Topographic Constraints Shape Brain-Like Component Structure in Auditory Models

If topography is a fundamental feature of the brain, it should influence both how neurons are arranged in space (i.e. explain brain maps) and how information is structured within the neural population. The human auditory cortex provides a strong, but previously underused test for the latter idea. Neural responses measured with both fMRI and ECoG can be decomposed into interpretable components corresponding to sound categories such as speech, music, and song, offering a view of how sound information is partitioned in the brain. Here we ask whether introducing topographic constraints into the training of audio neural network models shapes their internal representations to better match the component structure observed in the brain. To address this question, we introduce a new class of topographic auditory models, TopoAudio, which incorporate wiring-length constraints and encourage nearby units on a two-dimensional cortical sheet to develop similar response tuning. Despite these additional constraints we find that TopoAudio achieves comparable performance on standard speech and environmental sound classification tasks to standard non-topographic models and matches them in predicting human fMRI responses. Crucially however, topographic models develop more compact internal representations, and their inferred components align more closely with those derived from human ECoG recordings. These results provide initial evidence that topography offers a general mechanism for producing biologically aligned internal representations in artificial neural networks. More broadly, component-level alignment provides a complementary way for testing whether topography reshapes population responses in models to better match the representational structure observed in neural recordings. Our project page: https://topoaudio.github.io