Brain Mapping with Dense Features: Grounding Cortical Semantic Selectivity in Natural Images With Vision Transformers

TL;DR

BrainSAIL is a novel method that uses dense features from pre-trained vision transformers to map and analyze neural selectivity for semantic and visual features in the human cortex, without additional training.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to link neural activity with dense, semantically consistent visual features using pre-trained models and a denoising process, enabling detailed brain mapping.

Findings

Accurately localizes category-specific brain regions.

Characterizes high-level scene and low-level visual feature selectivity.

Enables comparison of feature selectivity across brain regions.

Abstract

We introduce BrainSAIL, a method for linking neural selectivity with spatially distributed semantic visual concepts in natural scenes. BrainSAIL leverages recent advances in large-scale artificial neural networks, using them to provide insights into the functional topology of the brain. To overcome the challenge presented by the co-occurrence of multiple categories in natural images, BrainSAIL exploits semantically consistent, dense spatial features from pre-trained vision models, building upon their demonstrated ability to robustly predict neural activity. This method derives clean, spatially dense embeddings without requiring any additional training, and employs a novel denoising process that leverages the semantic consistency of images under random augmentations. By unifying the space of whole-image embeddings and dense visual features and then applying voxel-wise encoding models to these features, we enable the identification of specific subregions of each image which drive selectivity patterns in different areas of the higher visual cortex. This provides a powerful tool for dissecting the neural mechanisms that underlie semantic visual processing for natural images. We validate BrainSAIL on cortical regions with known category selectivity, demonstrating its ability to accurately localize and disentangle selectivity to diverse visual concepts. Next, we demonstrate BrainSAIL's ability to characterize high-level visual selectivity to scene properties and low-level visual features such as depth, luminance, and saturation, providing insights into the encoding of complex visual information. Finally, we use BrainSAIL to directly compare the feature selectivity of different brain encoding models across different regions of interest in visual cortex. Our innovative method paves the way for significant advances in mapping and decomposing high-level visual representations in the human brain.