Conducting Neuroscience to Guide the Development of AI

Abstract

Study of the human brain through fMRI can potentially benefit the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Four examples are presented. First, fMRI decoding of the brain activity of subjects watching video clips yields higher accuracy than state-of-the-art computer-vision approaches to activity recognition. Second, novel methods are presented that decode aggregate representations of complex visual stimuli by decoding their independent constituents. Third, cross-modal studies demonstrate the ability to decode the brain activity induced in subjects watching video stimuli when trained on the brain activity induced in subjects seeing text or hearing speech stimuli and vice versa. Fourth, the time course of brain processing while watching video stimuli is probed with scanning that trades off the amount of the brain scanned for the frequency at which it is scanned. Techniques like these can be used to study how the human brain grounds language in visual perception and may motivate development of novel approaches in AI.