New AI models now show incredible math skill, solving problems that had stumped mathematicians for years. But what about basic geometric abilities? In our new paper in PLOS Computational Biology, we investigate this in vision models: doi.org/10.1371/jour... 1/8

Can neural networks model the human perception of geometric shapes?

Author summary Recent neural networks have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of visual tasks, often rivaling or surpassing human performance. Yet, it remains unclear whether these system...

doi.org

Our new paper is now out in @pnas.org! How does the (baby) brain extract regularities from sequences from what-follows-what up to large-scale network structure? What if it all came from a single mechanism? www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Representations of geometric shapes have syntactic structure w/ @maxencepajot.bsky.social and @standehaene.bsky.social is out & open-access in JEP:General doi.org/10.1037/xge0.... For an overview, see thread below!

Barbu Revencu@barbu-revencu.bsky.social · 2y ago

Preprint alert (link below)! @maxencepajot.bsky.social, @standehaene.bsky.social, and I show that human adults, but not convolutional or transformer networks, encode geometric shapes in hierarchically structured representations. TL;DR: Geometric-shape representations have internal syntax! 1/8

Our new study (Debray*, Karami* et al.) explores how the brain encodes basic math concepts (integers, fractions, shapes). Samuel Debray led the 7T fMRI & behavioral work; I led the MEG. @danielavalerio.bsky.social @chrplr.bsky.social @standehaene.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Some numbers seem to show up everywhere. Think of 10, 12, 24, 36... Others—like 26 or 34—don’t get the same attention.Why? In our new paper with @standehaene.bsky.social and @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social, we argue it's because of how the mind builds number concepts. 🧵 doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Preprint alert (link below)! @maxencepajot.bsky.social, @standehaene.bsky.social, and I show that human adults, but not convolutional or transformer networks, encode geometric shapes in hierarchically structured representations. TL;DR: Geometric-shape representations have internal syntax! 1/8