# Brain-like emergent properties in deep networks: impact of network architecture, datasets and training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16326/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 101 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02175/) (2019)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [Intriguing Properties of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10497/) (2021)
- [ResNet strikes back: An improved training procedure in timm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00476/) (2021)
- [Noise or Signal: The Role of Image Backgrounds in Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09994/) (2020)
- [An Analysis of Scale Invariance in Object Detection - SNIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08189/) (2017)
- [Are Convolutional Neural Networks or Transformers more like human vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07197/) (2021)
- [Brain-Like Object Recognition with High-Performing Shallow Recurrent ANNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06161/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Study on Robustness of Image Classification Models: Benchmarking and Rethinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14301/) (2023)

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

- [Disentangling the Factors of Convergence between Brains and Computer Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18226/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the rapid pace at which deep networks are improving on standardized vision benchmarks, they are still outperformed by humans on real-world vision tasks. One solution to this problem is to make deep networks more brain-like. Although there are several benchmarks that compare the ability of deep networks to predict brain responses on natural images, they do not capture subtle but important emergent properties present in brains. It is also unclear which design principle -- architecture, training data, or training regime -- would have the greatest impact on these emergent properties. To investigate these issues, we systematically evaluated over 30 state-of-the-art networks with varying network architectures, training datasets, and training regimes for the presence or absence of brain-like properties. Our main findings are as follows. First, network architecture had the strongest impact on brain-like properties compared to dataset and training regime variations. Second, networks varied widely in their alignment to the brain with no single network outperforming all others. Taken together, our results offer a principled and interpretable path toward closing the gap between artificial and human vision.