FlyHack evaluates how mechanistic conclusions drawn from connectome-constrained neural networks depend on model choice, interventions, circuit representation, and training outcomes. Using a 50‑model ensemble of the flyvis motion‑vision system and task‑matched causal CNN controls, the study finds that key behavioral phenomena—such as reverse‑phi reversal and stationary‑sawtooth responses—vary across models and are not consistently reproduced by CNNs. At the mechanistic level, attribution accuracy and circuit conclusions also differ markedly with representation and ensemble member, indicating that mechanistic claims must be scoped to the specific model family and experimental conditions.
The study compares nine reconstructions of the Drosophila head‑direction circuit, including four different flies and five variants of the same fly with altered thresholds, proofreading, or synapse detection. It finds that changes within a single fly’s reconstruction can alter the circuit more than half the difference seen between different flies, and that neural‑network models trained on one wiring fail to transfer to others, with errors increasing dramatically when weights are perturbed. Despite these reconstruction differences, imaging data show that the biological compass remains functional and stable.
By Md Ali Ashraf Yad, Nazifa Tabassum Nabila
arXiv:2609.24565v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: A connectome-constrained model of the fly visual system, optimized for motion and then frozen, can be driven over architectural drawings by prescri...
By Dmitry Kuklev
arXiv:2610.08418v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Biological connectomes encode structured solutions to visual computation that may provide reusable inductive biases for artificial vision. We develop C...
By Zongyu Li, Akito Yamauchi, Huaizhi Liu, Vishwanatha Rao, Jia Guo, for the Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration Neuroimaging Initiative, for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
arXiv:2609.24379v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability of vision transformers seeks to decompose model computation into human-readable units, but learned representations entan...
By Gautam Ranka, Shubham Santosh Pandere, Aiden Dsouza
arXiv:2608. 12408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Representational similarity analysis (RSA) is increasingly used to ask which learning rules give convolutional networks brain-like representations.
By Nils Leutenegger