Reconstructing feedback representations in the ventral visual pathway with a generative adversarial autoencoder

While vision evokes a dense network of feedforward and feedback neural processes in the brain, visual processes are primarily modeled with feedforward hierarchical neural networks, leaving the computational role of feedback processes poorly understood. Here, we developed a generative autoencoder neural network model and adversarially trained it on a categorically diverse data set of images. We hypothesized that the feedback processes in the ventral visual pathway can be represented by reconstruction of the visual information performed by the generative model. We compared representational similarity of the activity patterns in the proposed model with temporal (magnetoencephalography) and spatial (functional magnetic resonance imaging) visual brain responses. The proposed generative model identified two segregated neural dynamics in the visual brain. A temporal hierarchy of processes transforming low level visual information into high level semantics in the feedforward sweep, and a temporally later dynamics of inverse processes reconstructing low level visual information from a high level latent representation in the feedback sweep. Our results append to previous studies on neural feedback processes by presenting a new insight into the algorithmic function and the information carried by the feedback processes in the ventral visual pathway.Author summary: It has been shown that the ventral visual cortex consists of a dense network of regions with feedforward and feedback connections. The feedforward path processes visual inputs along a hierarchy of cortical areas that starts in early visual cortex (an area tuned to low level features e.g. edges/corners) and ends in inferior temporal cortex (an area that responds to higher level categorical contents e.g. faces/objects). Alternatively, the feedback connections modulate neuronal responses in this hierarchy by broadcasting information from higher to lower areas. In recent years, deep neural network models which are trained on object recognition tasks achieved human-level performance and showed similar activation patterns to the visual brain. In this work, we developed a generative neural network model that consists of encoding and decoding sub-networks. By comparing this computational model with the human brain temporal (magnetoencephalography) and spatial (functional magnetic resonance imaging) response patterns, we found that the encoder processes resemble the brain feedforward processing dynamics and the decoder shares similarity with the brain feedback processing dynamics. These results provide an algorithmic insight into the spatiotemporal dynamics of feedforward and feedback processes in biological vision.