arXiv Machine Learning By Farhad Pashakhanloo, Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth

Stimulus symmetries can confound representational similarity analyses

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The paper investigates how symmetries in network inputs can mislead representational similarity analyses (RSAs). It shows that functionally equivalent representations, arising from stimulus symmetries, can produce distinct RSMs that depict different representational geometries—from disentangled to maximally mixed. The authors demonstrate that training dynamics such as stochastic gradient descent or energetic regularization can yield sparse, drifting codes, causing RSMs to drift over time, and that these effects also appear in networks trained on image data with latent symmetries.

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