Study: Evaluation Resolution Creates Artifacts in Brain-Model Comparisons

ConfusionSpiritual19 · reddit · 2026-08-22

A preprint study suggests that the widespread claim that untrained CNNs match or surpass backprop-trained CNNs in the early visual cortex (V1) is largely an artifact of evaluation resolution. The study shows that the gap between trained and untrained models exhibits a non-monotonic trend across resolutions from 32px to 224px. Only at higher resolutions do trained models show a clear advantage. The study also fixes a batch-norm evaluation mode bug found in earlier preprints.

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