The Algonauts Project 2023 Challenge: How the Human Brain Makes Sense of Natural Scenes
This challenge addresses the problem of understanding brain function for neuroscientists and AI researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets and methods.
The paper introduces the Algonauts Project 2023 challenge, which aims to build computational models of the human visual brain using the Natural Scenes Dataset, a large fMRI dataset with ~73,000 natural scenes, to foster collaboration between biological and artificial intelligence researchers.
The sciences of biological and artificial intelligence are ever more intertwined. Neural computational principles inspire new intelligent machines, which are in turn used to advance theoretical understanding of the brain. To promote further exchange of ideas and collaboration between biological and artificial intelligence researchers, we introduce the 2023 installment of the Algonauts Project challenge: How the Human Brain Makes Sense of Natural Scenes (http://algonauts.csail.mit.edu). This installment prompts the fields of artificial and biological intelligence to come together towards building computational models of the visual brain using the largest and richest dataset of fMRI responses to visual scenes, the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD). NSD provides high-quality fMRI responses to ~73,000 different naturalistic colored scenes, making it the ideal candidate for data-driven model building approaches promoted by the 2023 challenge. The challenge is open to all and makes results directly comparable and transparent through a public leaderboard automatically updated after each submission, thus allowing for rapid model development. We believe that the 2023 installment will spark symbiotic collaborations between biological and artificial intelligence scientists, leading to a deeper understanding of the brain through cutting-edge computational models and to novel ways of engineering artificial intelligent agents through inductive biases from biological systems.