{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/multimodal-neurons-in-artificial-neural","title":"Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-09-02","proceeding":"Distill 2021 9","authors":["Gabriel Goh","Nick Cammarata","Chelsea Voss","Shan Carter","Michael Petrov","Ludwig Schubert","Alec Radford","Chris Olah"],"abstract":"In 2005, a letter published in Nature described human neurons responding to specific people, such as Jennifer Aniston or Halle Berry . The exciting thing wasn’t just that they selected for particular people, but that they did so regardless of whether they were shown photographs, drawings, or even images of the person’s name. The neurons were multimodal. As the lead author would put it: \"You are looking at the far end of the transformation from metric, visual shapes to conceptual… information.\" Quiroga's full quote, from reads: \"I think that’s the excitement to these results. You are looking at the far end of the transformation from metric, visual shapes to conceptual memory-related information. It is that transformation that underlies our ability to understand the world. It’s not enough to see something familiar and match it. It’s the fact that you plug visual information into the rich tapestry of memory that brings it to life.\" We elided the portion discussing memory since it was less relevant.\r\n\r\nWe report the existence of similar multimodal neurons in artificial neural networks. This includes neurons selecting for prominent public figures or fictional characters, such as Lady Gaga or Spiderman.","url_abs":"https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/","url_pdf":"https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"multimodal-neurons-in-artificial-neural","repo_url":"https://github.com/openai/clip-featurevis","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}