Brokoslaw Laschowski | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Bidirectional representational alignment between biological and artificial neural networks

Recent work has shown that representational alignment between biological and artificial neural networks is asymmetric: model representations predict neural responses much better than neural responses predict model representations. This asymmetry raises the question of whether representational geometry contributes to bidirectional representational alignment. We hypothesized that steering representational geometry during training can systematically influence bidirectional alignment. To test this hypothesis, we developed a computational framework that integrates spectral regularization with bidirectional predictivity analyses. As an initial demonstration, we evaluated our framework using self-supervised contrastive vision models. Steering the spectral geometry of the learned representations substantially increased reverse predictivity with modest reductions in forward predictivity, yielding a 55% relative improvement in bidirectional predictivity. These improvements were accompanied by reduced effective dimensionality and a reorganization of the shared representational subspace, within which forward and reverse predictivity became approximately symmetric at intermediate spectral exponents. Overall, these findings demonstrate that representational geometry can be systematically steered to modulate bidirectional representational alignment between biological and artificial neural networks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

StairNet: Visual Recognition of Stairs for Human-Robot Locomotion

Human-robot walking with prosthetic legs and exoskeletons, especially over complex terrains such as stairs, remains a significant challenge. Egocentric vision has the unique potential to detect the walking environment prior to physical interactions, which can improve transitions to and from stairs. This motivated us to create the StairNet initiative to support the development of new deep learning models for visual sensing and recognition of stairs, with an emphasis on lightweight and efficient neural networks for onboard real-time inference. In this study, we present an overview of the development of our large-scale dataset with over 515,000 manually labeled images, as well as our development of different deep learning models (e.g., 2D and 3D CNN, hybrid CNN and LSTM, and ViT networks) and training methods (e.g., supervised learning with temporal data and semi-supervised learning with unlabeled images) using our new dataset. We consistently achieved high classification accuracy (i.e., up to 98.8%) with different designs, offering trade-offs between model accuracy and size. When deployed on mobile devices with GPU and NPU accelerators, our deep learning models achieved inference speeds up to 2.8 ms. We also deployed our models on custom-designed CPU-powered smart glasses. However, limitations in the embedded hardware yielded slower inference speeds of 1.5 seconds, presenting a trade-off between human-centered design and performance. Overall, we showed that StairNet can be an effective platform to develop and study new visual perception systems for human-robot locomotion with applications in exoskeleton and prosthetic leg control.

cs.CV↗