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Subba Reddy Oota

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Machine Learning Neurons and Cognition Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Computer Vision eess.IV

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preprint2026arXiv

Brain alignment of reasoning and action representations from vision-language and action models during naturalistic gameplay

Understanding how humans and artificial intelligence systems predict and plan by interacting with their environment is a fundamental challenge at the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning. Most brain-encoding studies focus on aligning artificial models with brain activity during language comprehension or passive visual processing, while interactive brain-alignment studies have to date been largely limited to reinforcement-learning (RL) agents and theory-based models. To address this gap, we study brain alignment of representative models from two foundation-model families, namely vision-language models (VLMs) and large-action models (LAMs), using fMRI recordings from participants playing naturalistic Atari-style video games. Specifically, we examine how action-focused and reasoning-focused prompts shape model's internal representations and align with fMRI brain activity. First, we find that both VLMs and LAMs exhibit significantly exhibit voxel-wise encoding performance than RL baselines, with the advantage holding even under matched feature dimensionality. Second, prompt-driven gains scale with the cortical processing hierarchy: the largest improvements appear in frontal-parietal and motor-planning regions, while early visual cortex gains roughly half as much. Third, variance partitioning reveals a qualitatively different representational organization: VLM is prompt-symmetric (12.5% unique action vs. 13.6% unique reasoning), whereas LAM is prompt-asymmetric (27% unique action vs. -5% unique reasoning), with the asymmetry strongest in frontal-motor cortex. Together, these results demonstrate that action-specialized fine-tuning reorganizes multimodal representations toward action-relevant neural computations even when whole-brain prediction accuracy is statistically equivalent between VLM and LAM.

preprint2022arXiv

Cross-view Brain Decoding

How the brain captures the meaning of linguistic stimuli across multiple views is still a critical open question in neuroscience. Consider three different views of the concept apartment: (1) picture (WP) presented with the target word label, (2) sentence (S) using the target word, and (3) word cloud (WC) containing the target word along with other semantically related words. Unlike previous efforts, which focus only on single view analysis, in this paper, we study the effectiveness of brain decoding in a zero-shot cross-view learning setup. Further, we propose brain decoding in the novel context of cross-view-translation tasks like image captioning (IC), image tagging (IT), keyword extraction (KE), and sentence formation (SF). Using extensive experiments, we demonstrate that cross-view zero-shot brain decoding is practical leading to ~0.68 average pairwise accuracy across view pairs. Also, the decoded representations are sufficiently detailed to enable high accuracy for cross-view-translation tasks with following pairwise accuracy: IC (78.0), IT (83.0), KE (83.7) and SF (74.5). Analysis of the contribution of different brain networks reveals exciting cognitive insights: (1) A high percentage of visual voxels are involved in image captioning and image tagging tasks, and a high percentage of language voxels are involved in the sentence formation and keyword extraction tasks. (2) Zero-shot accuracy of the model trained on S view and tested on WC view is better than same-view accuracy of the model trained and tested on WC view.

preprint2022arXiv

Visio-Linguistic Brain Encoding

Enabling effective brain-computer interfaces requires understanding how the human brain encodes stimuli across modalities such as visual, language (or text), etc. Brain encoding aims at constructing fMRI brain activity given a stimulus. There exists a plethora of neural encoding models which study brain encoding for single mode stimuli: visual (pretrained CNNs) or text (pretrained language models). Few recent papers have also obtained separate visual and text representation models and performed late-fusion using simple heuristics. However, previous work has failed to explore: (a) the effectiveness of image Transformer models for encoding visual stimuli, and (b) co-attentive multi-modal modeling for visual and text reasoning. In this paper, we systematically explore the efficacy of image Transformers (ViT, DEiT, and BEiT) and multi-modal Transformers (VisualBERT, LXMERT, and CLIP) for brain encoding. Extensive experiments on two popular datasets, BOLD5000 and Pereira, provide the following insights. (1) To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the effectiveness of image and multi-modal Transformers for brain encoding. (2) We find that VisualBERT, a multi-modal Transformer, significantly outperforms previously proposed single-mode CNNs, image Transformers as well as other previously proposed multi-modal models, thereby establishing new state-of-the-art. The supremacy of visio-linguistic models raises the question of whether the responses elicited in the visual regions are affected implicitly by linguistic processing even when passively viewing images. Future fMRI tasks can verify this computational insight in an appropriate experimental setting.

preprint2020arXiv

Expert2Coder: Capturing Divergent Brain Regions Using Mixture of Regression Experts

fMRI semantic category understanding using linguistic encoding models attempts to learn a forward mapping that relates stimuli to the corresponding brain activation. State-of-the-art encoding models use a single global model (linear or non-linear) to predict brain activation given the stimulus. However, the critical assumption in these methods is that a priori different brain regions respond the same way to all the stimuli, that is, there is no modularity or specialization assumed for any region. This goes against the modularity theory, supported by many cognitive neuroscience investigations suggesting that there are functionally specialized regions in the brain. In this paper, we achieve this by clustering similar regions together and for every cluster we learn a different linear regression model using a mixture of linear experts model. The key idea here is that each linear expert captures the behaviour of similar brain regions. Given a new stimulus, the utility of the proposed model is twofold (i) predicts the brain activation as a weighted linear combination of the activations of multiple linear experts and (ii) to learn multiple experts corresponding to different brain regions. We argue that each expert captures activity patterns related to a particular region of interest (ROI) in the human brain. This study helps in understanding the brain regions that are activated together given different kinds of stimuli. Importantly, we suggest that the mixture of regression experts (MoRE) framework successfully combines the two principles of organization of function in the brain, namely that of specialization and integration. Experiments on fMRI data from paradigm 1 [1]where participants view linguistic stimuli show that the proposed MoRE model has better prediction accuracy compared to that of conventional models.