# Emergent Neural Network Mechanisms for Generalization to Objects in Novel Orientations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13445 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13445/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Group Equivariant Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07576/) (2016)
- [Spherical CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10130/) (2018)
- [Steerable CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08498/) (2016)
- [Understanding image representations by measuring their equivariance and equivalence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5908/) (2014)
- [Strike (with) a Pose: Neural Networks Are Easily Fooled by Strange Poses of Familiar Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11553/) (2018)
- [NeMo: Neural Mesh Models of Contrastive Features for Robust 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12378/) (2021)
- [Robustness to Transformations Across Categories: Is Robustness To Transformations Driven by Invariant Neural Representations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00112/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Approaching human 3D shape perception with neurally mappable models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11300/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The capability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to recognize objects in orientations outside the distribution of the training data is not well understood. We present evidence that DNNs are capable of generalizing to objects in novel orientations by disseminating orientation-invariance obtained from familiar objects seen from many viewpoints. This capability strengthens when training the DNN with an increasing number of familiar objects, but only in orientations that involve 2D rotations of familiar orientations. We show that this dissemination is achieved via neurons tuned to common features between familiar and unfamiliar objects. These results implicate brain-like neural mechanisms for generalization.