SSPictR: A Biologically-plausible Image Representation

Anna Penzkofer, Karim Habashy, Chris Eliasmith, Andreas Bulling

ECAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Cognition (AIC), pp. 1–13, 2025.

Oral Presentation

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Abstract

Finding interpretable and generalisable representations of natural images has the potential to increase performance on various computer vision tasks, particularly those that require semantic information and spatial understanding, such as image segmentation or scene recognition. Drawing inspiration from a cognitive modelling framework, we propose SSPictR - a biologically plausible image representation based on spatial semantic pointers (SSPs). SSPictR encodes semantic labels of objects and their spatial locations extracted from segmentation maps. It only requires a single vector to capture a compressed but fully decodable neuro-symbolic representation of an image. We demonstrate the biological plausibility of SSPictR by performing representation similarity analysis, finding a significant correlation with fMRI data recorded from the early visual cortex. We further highlight the effectiveness and out-of-domain generalisability of SSPictR representations by training a compact model for scene recognition on standard benchmark datasets. Our simple neural network achieves performance on par with previous work, while having more than three times fewer trainable parameters. Taken together, SSPictR bridges the gap between biological plausibility and effective representations for tasks in computer vision and beyond.

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