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Why predicting brain activity isn't enough to understand AI vision

Ken Nakamura, Tomoya Nakai, Ryuto Yashiro, Ayumu Yamashita, Kaoru Amano

May 19, 2026

Researchers developed a framework that goes beyond prediction accuracy to identify which specific dimensions of brain activity a model actually captures. Using fMRI data from eight subjects viewing images, they show that early visual cortex activity has a low-dimensional structure, and that even models with identical prediction scores can recover different aspects of this structure. This matters because it reveals that current AI-brain comparisons may be fundamentally misleading.
Published as Beyond Prediction Accuracy: Target-Space Recovery Profiles for Evaluating Model-Brain Alignment arXiv:2605.20127
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