Papers › Do Invariances in Deep Neural Networks Align with Human Perception?

Do Invariances in Deep Neural Networks Align with Human Perception?

29 Nov 2021arXiv:2111.14726archive 2025-07-28

Vedant Nanda, Ayan Majumdar, Camila Kolling, John P. Dickerson, Krishna P. Gummadi, Bradley C. Love, Adrian Weller

An evaluation criterion for safe and trustworthy deep learning is how well the invariances captured by representations of deep neural networks (DNNs) are shared with humans. We identify challenges in measuring these invariances. Prior works used gradient-based methods to generate identically represented inputs (IRIs), ie, inputs which have identical representations (on a given layer) of a neural network, and thus capture invariances of a given network. One necessary criterion for a network's invariances to align with human perception is for its IRIs look 'similar' to humans. Prior works, however, have mixed takeaways; some argue that later layers of DNNs do not learn human-like invariances (\cite{jenelle2019metamers}) yet others seem to indicate otherwise (\cite{mahendran2014understanding}). We argue that the loss function used to generate IRIs can heavily affect takeaways about invariances of the network and is the primary reason for these conflicting findings. We propose an adversarial regularizer on the IRI generation loss that finds IRIs that make any model appear to have very little shared invariance with humans. Based on this evidence, we argue that there is scope for improving models to have human-like invariances, and further, to have meaningful comparisons between models one should use IRIs generated using the regularizer-free loss. We then conduct an in-depth investigation of how different components (eg architectures, training losses, data augmentations) of the deep learning pipeline contribute to learning models that have good alignment with humans. We find that architectures with residual connections trained using a (self-supervised) contrastive loss with ℓₚ ball adversarial data augmentation tend to learn invariances that are most aligned with humans. Code: \url{github.com/nvedant07/Human-NN-Alignment}.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

nvedant07/human-nn-alignment officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Data AugmentationSelf-Supervised Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

ALIGN

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections