Don't stop the training: continuously-updating self-supervised algorithms best account for auditory responses in the cortex
This provides empirical evidence for a common learning mechanism between self-supervised models and the mammalian cortex, which is incremental as it builds on existing comparisons of representations.
The study tackled the problem of whether artificial neural networks learn like the brain by comparing auditory cortex responses in ferrets to activations of Wav2vec 2.0 under different training modes, finding that continuous updating after each sound increased similarity to brain responses.
Over the last decade, numerous studies have shown that deep neural networks exhibit sensory representations similar to those of the mammalian brain, in that their activations linearly map onto cortical responses to the same sensory inputs. However, it remains unknown whether these artificial networks also learn like the brain. To address this issue, we analyze the brain responses of two ferret auditory cortices recorded with functional UltraSound imaging (fUS), while the animals were presented with 320 10\,s sounds. We compare these brain responses to the activations of Wav2vec 2.0, a self-supervised neural network pretrained with 960\,h of speech, and input with the same 320 sounds. Critically, we evaluate Wav2vec 2.0 under two distinct modes: (i) "Pretrained", where the same model is used for all sounds, and (ii) "Continuous Update", where the weights of the pretrained model are modified with back-propagation after every sound, presented in the same order as the ferrets. Our results show that the Continuous-Update mode leads Wav2Vec 2.0 to generate activations that are more similar to the brain than a Pretrained Wav2Vec 2.0 or than other control models using different training modes. These results suggest that the trial-by-trial modifications of self-supervised algorithms induced by back-propagation aligns with the corresponding fluctuations of cortical responses to sounds. Our finding thus provides empirical evidence of a common learning mechanism between self-supervised models and the mammalian cortex during sound processing.