Derya Soydaner

Derya Soydaner

A long time ago in the machine learning literature, the idea of incorporating a mechanism inspired by the human visual system into neural networks was introduced. This idea is named the attention mechanism, and it has gone through a long development period. Today, many works have been devoted to this idea in a variety of tasks. Remarkable performance has recently been demonstrated. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview from the early work on searching for ways to implement attention idea with neural networks until the recent trends. This review emphasizes the important milestones during this progress regarding different tasks. By this way, this study aims to provide a road map for researchers to explore the current development and get inspired for novel approaches beyond the attention.

Anne-Sofie Maerten, Derya Soydaner

This paper delves into the fascinating field of AI-generated art and explores the various deep neural network architectures and models that have been utilized to create it. From the classic convolutional networks to the cutting-edge diffusion models, we examine the key players in the field. We explain the general structures and working principles of these neural networks. Then, we showcase examples of milestones, starting with the dreamy landscapes of DeepDream and moving on to the most recent developments, including Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3, which produce mesmerizing images. We provide a detailed comparison of these models, highlighting their strengths and limitations, and examining the remarkable progress that deep neural networks have made so far in a short period of time. With a unique blend of technical explanations and insights into the current state of AI-generated art, this paper exemplifies how art and computer science interact.

Hüseyin Bahtiyar, Derya Soydaner, Esra Yüksel

Neural networks have become popular in many fields of science since they serve as promising, reliable and powerful tools. In this work, we study the effect of data augmentation on the predictive power of neural network models for nuclear physics data. We present two different data augmentation techniques, and we conduct a detailed analysis in terms of different depths, optimizers, activation functions and random seed values to show the success and robustness of the model. Using the experimental uncertainties for data augmentation for the first time, the size of the training data set is artificially boosted and the changes in the root-mean-square error between the model predictions on the test set and the experimental data are investigated. Our results show that the data augmentation decreases the prediction errors, stabilizes the model and prevents overfitting. The extrapolation capabilities of the MLP models are also tested for newly measured nuclei in AME2020 mass table, and it is shown that the predictions are significantly improved by using data augmentation.

Derya Soydaner, Johan Wagemans

The allure of aesthetic appeal in images captivates our senses, yet the underlying intricacies of aesthetic preferences remain elusive. In this study, we pioneer a novel perspective by utilizing several different machine learning (ML) models that focus on aesthetic attributes known to influence preferences. Our models process these attributes as inputs to predict the aesthetic scores of images. Moreover, to delve deeper and obtain interpretable explanations regarding the factors driving aesthetic preferences, we utilize the popular Explainable AI (XAI) technique known as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Our methodology compares the performance of various ML models, including Random Forest, XGBoost, Support Vector Regression, and Multilayer Perceptron, in accurately predicting aesthetic scores, and consistently observing results in conjunction with SHAP. We conduct experiments on three image aesthetic benchmarks, namely Aesthetics with Attributes Database (AADB), Explainable Visual Aesthetics (EVA), and Personalized image Aesthetics database with Rich Attributes (PARA), providing insights into the roles of attributes and their interactions. Finally, our study presents ML models for aesthetics research, alongside the introduction of XAI. Our aim is to shed light on the complex nature of aesthetic preferences in images through ML and to provide a deeper understanding of the attributes that influence aesthetic judgements.

Ombretta Strafforello, Derya Soydaner, Michiel Willems et al.

The emergence of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has established new baselines in image classification across multiple domains. We examine whether their multimodal reasoning can also address a challenge mastered by human experts. Specifically, we test whether VLMs can classify the style, author and creation date of paintings, a domain traditionally mastered by art historians. Artworks pose a unique challenge compared to natural images due to their inherently complex and diverse structures, characterized by variable compositions and styles. This requires a contextual and stylistic interpretation rather than straightforward object recognition. Art historians have long studied the unique aspects of artworks, with style prediction being a crucial component of their discipline. This paper investigates whether large VLMs, which integrate visual and textual data, can effectively reason about the historical and stylistic attributes of paintings. We present the first study of its kind, conducting an in-depth analysis of three VLMs, namely CLIP, LLaVA, and GPT-4o, evaluating their zero-shot classification of art style, author and time period. Using two image benchmarks of artworks, we assess the models' ability to interpret style, evaluate their sensitivity to prompts, and examine failure cases. Additionally, we focus on how these models compare to human art historical expertise by analyzing misclassifications, providing insights into their reasoning and classification patterns.

Ombretta Strafforello, Gonzalo Muradas Odriozola, Fatemeh Behrad et al.

Assessing the aesthetic quality of artistic images presents unique challenges due to the subjective nature of aesthetics and the complex visual characteristics inherent to artworks. Basic data augmentation techniques commonly applied to natural images in computer vision may not be suitable for art images in aesthetic evaluation tasks, as they can change the composition of the art images. In this paper, we explore the impact of local and global data augmentation techniques on artistic image aesthetic assessment (IAA). We introduce BackFlip, a local data augmentation technique designed specifically for artistic IAA. We evaluate the performance of BackFlip across three artistic image datasets and four neural network architectures, comparing it with the commonly used data augmentation techniques. Then, we analyze the effects of components within the BackFlip pipeline through an ablation study. Our findings demonstrate that local augmentations, such as BackFlip, tend to outperform global augmentations on artistic IAA in most cases, probably because they do not perturb the composition of the art images. These results emphasize the importance of considering both local and global augmentations in future computational aesthetics research.

Yuyan Zhang, Derya Soydaner, Lisa Koßmann et al.

The human brain has an inherent ability to fill in gaps to perceive figures as complete wholes, even when parts are missing or fragmented. This phenomenon is known as Closure in psychology, one of the Gestalt laws of perceptual organization, explaining how the human brain interprets visual stimuli. Given the importance of Closure for human object recognition, we investigate whether neural networks rely on a similar mechanism. Exploring this crucial human visual skill in neural networks has the potential to highlight their comparability to humans. Recent studies have examined the Closure effect in neural networks. However, they typically focus on a limited selection of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and have not reached a consensus on their capability to perform Closure. To address these gaps, we present a systematic framework for investigating the Closure principle in neural networks. We introduce well-curated datasets designed to test for Closure effects, including both modal and amodal completion. We then conduct experiments on various CNNs employing different measurements. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that VGG16 and DenseNet-121 exhibit the Closure effect, while other CNNs show variable results. We interpret these findings by blending insights from psychology and neural network research, offering a unique perspective that enhances transparency in understanding neural networks. Our code and dataset will be made available on GitHub.

Qianpu Chen, Derya Soydaner, Rob Saunders

When visual evidence is ambiguous, vision models must decide whether to interpret face-like patterns as meaningful. Face pareidolia, the perception of faces in non-face objects, provides a controlled probe of this behavior. We introduce a representation-level diagnostic framework that analyzes detection, localization, uncertainty, and bias across class, difficulty, and emotion in face pareidolia images. Under a unified protocol, we evaluate six models spanning four representational regimes: vision-language models (VLMs; CLIP-B/32, CLIP-L/14, LLaVA-1.5-7B), pure vision classification (ViT), general object detection (YOLOv8), and face detection (RetinaFace). Our analysis reveals three mechanisms of interpretation under ambiguity. VLMs exhibit semantic overactivation, systematically pulling ambiguous non-human regions toward the Human concept, with LLaVA-1.5-7B producing the strongest and most confident over-calls, especially for negative emotions. ViT instead follows an uncertainty-as-abstention strategy, remaining diffuse yet largely unbiased. Detection-based models achieve low bias through conservative priors that suppress pareidolia responses even when localization is controlled. These results show that behavior under ambiguity is governed more by representational choices than score thresholds, and that uncertainty and bias are decoupled: low uncertainty can signal either safe suppression, as in detectors, or extreme over-interpretation, as in VLMs. Pareidolia therefore provides a compact diagnostic and a source of ambiguity-aware hard negatives for probing and improving the semantic robustness of vision-language systems. Code will be released upon publication.

Qianpu Chen, Giulio Barbero, Mike Preuss et al.

We introduce Emergent Trust Learning (ETL), a lightweight, trust-based control algorithm that can be plugged into existing AI agents. It enables these to reach cooperation in competitive game environments under shared resources. Each agent maintains a compact internal trust state, which modulates memory, exploration, and action selection. ETL requires only individual rewards and local observations and incurs negligible computational and communication overhead. We evaluate ETL in three environments: In a grid-based resource world, trust-based agents reduce conflicts and prevent long-term resource depletion while achieving competitive individual returns. In a hierarchical Tower environment with strong social dilemmas and randomised floor assignments, ETL sustains high survival rates and recovers cooperation even after extended phases of enforced greed. In the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, the algorithm generalises to a strategic meta-game, maintaining cooperation with reciprocal opponents while avoiding long-term exploitation by defectors. Code will be released upon publication.

Yuyan Zhang, Derya Soydaner, Fatemeh Behrad et al.

Deep neural networks perform well in object recognition, but do they perceive objects like humans? This study investigates the Gestalt principle of closure in convolutional neural networks. We propose a protocol to identify closure and conduct experiments using simple visual stimuli with progressively removed edge sections. We evaluate well-known networks on their ability to classify incomplete polygons. Our findings reveal a performance degradation as the edge removal percentage increases, indicating that current models heavily rely on complete edge information for accurate classification. The data used in our study is available on Github.

Derya Soydaner, Johan Wagemans

As people's aesthetic preferences for images are far from understood, image aesthetic assessment is a challenging artificial intelligence task. The range of factors underlying this task is almost unlimited, but we know that some aesthetic attributes affect those preferences. In this study, we present a multi-task convolutional neural network that takes into account these attributes. The proposed neural network jointly learns the attributes along with the overall aesthetic scores of images. This multi-task learning framework allows for effective generalization through the utilization of shared representations. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in predicting overall aesthetic scores for images in one benchmark of image aesthetics. We achieve near-human performance in terms of overall aesthetic scores when considering the Spearman's rank correlations. Moreover, our model pioneers the application of multi-tasking in another benchmark, serving as a new baseline for future research. Notably, our approach achieves this performance while using fewer parameters compared to existing multi-task neural networks in the literature, and consequently makes our method more efficient in terms of computational complexity.

Derya Soydaner

In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of deep learning. Deep neural networks have proved their success in many areas. However, the optimization of these networks has become more difficult as neural networks going deeper and datasets becoming bigger. Therefore, more advanced optimization algorithms have been proposed over the past years. In this study, widely used optimization algorithms for deep learning are examined in detail. To this end, these algorithms called adaptive gradient methods are implemented for both supervised and unsupervised tasks. The behaviour of the algorithms during training and results on four image datasets, namely, MNIST, CIFAR-10, Kaggle Flowers and Labeled Faces in the Wild are compared by pointing out their differences against basic optimization algorithms.