Abstract
Fueled by the development of neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI), recent advances in the brain-inspired AI have manifested a tipping-point in the collaboration of the two fields. AI began with the inspiration of neuroscience, but has evolved to achieve a remarkable performance with little dependence upon neuroscience. However, in a recent collaboration, research into neurobiological explainability of AI models found that these highly accurate models may resemble the neurobiological representation of the same computational processes in the brain, although these models have been developed in the absence of such neuroscientific references. In this perspective, we review the cooperation and separation between neuroscience and AI, and emphasize on the current advance, that is, a new cooperation, the neurobiological explainability of AI. Under the intertwined development of the two fields, we propose a practical framework to evaluate the brain-likeness of AI models, paving the way for their further improvements.
Introduction
Artificial intelligence (AI) starts with the notion of creating Turing-powerful intelligent systems (Turing, 1936). He claimed that his desire was to build a machine to “imitate a brain” and also to “mimic the behavior of the human,” which means the likeness to both the brain and the behavior is requisite to realize such intelligent systems. For this to happen, pioneers in the field (Rosenblatt, 1958; ; ; ) have drawn inspiration from the neurobiological representation to develop AI models. However, early models or algorithms strictly mimicking the neural processes in the brain have constantly failed to deliver satisfactory performances, such as the perceptron (Rosenblatt, 1958), Hebbian learning rules (), and Sigmoid (). Gradually, computer scientists have strayed away from neuroscience and turned to engineering and mathematical solutions to design “outcome-driven” models. These models achieved remarkable performance in many aspects, including but not limited to object recognition (Riesenhuber and Poggio, 2000), speech and music recognition (; Sutskever et al., 2019), and motor movement (Todorov, 2000).
Nonetheless, comparison between AI and the brain has never stopped. Once optimized performance is achieved, researchers (Yamins et al., 2014; ; ; Zhuang et al., 2021) begin to search for the neurobiological explainability of these advanced models, that is, the similarity of the neurobiological representation of the same computational processes between AI models and the brain. The authors wish that through unraveling the neurobiological explainability of AI models, one could achieve a better understanding of the brain and thus promote the development of neuroscience (). Interestingly, in return, the evaluation of resemblance between current AI models and the brain may also shed lights on how far away these models are to the Turing-powerful (i.e., brain-like) intelligent systems.
During the three stages (Figure 1) of AI development, the role of neuroscience has experienced a shift from the “guide,” who provides guiding principles to the design of AI models, to the “judge,” who provide references for the evaluation of AI models. In this review, we will look back to the mutual development of AI and neuroscience, and propose a framework to evaluate the brain-likeness of AI models that can serve AI development in multiple ways.
FIGURE 1
The collaboration and separation of artificial intelligence and neuroscience
Brain is the most complex and efficient non-artificial intelligent system known to humans. Throughout history, the promise of creating machine intelligence with brain-like ability has been a motivation of innovation (Roy et al., 2019). One way to realize such intelligence is to scrutinize the organization principles of brain’s structures and functions and thus seek inspiration for the design of AI.
In the initial collaboration between AI and neuroscience, the direct inspiration from neuroscience accelerated the start-up of AI. The earliest application was the perceptron (Rosenblatt, 1958), a simple abstract of neurons, mimicking the simple neuronal activity in visual cortex, such as the weights of synapses, the biases of the thresholds, and the activation function of the neural cells. Years later, inspired by
Although AI is profoundly inspired by the neurobiological representation of the brain, surprisingly, these brain-mimicking models have never achieved a satisfactory performance, likely due to their over-simplification of the real neural system. For instance, Hebbian learning, a neurobiologically schemed method, fail to produce models with adequate performance as it does not take into consideration of the synapse’s downstream effect on the network output (
Neurobiological explainability of artificial intelligence
Despite of the turning of design principles from mimicking neurobiological representation of the brain to optimizing performance with tools from engineering and mathematics, AI and neuroscience have never really grown apart. With the rapid development of AI, researchers (Yamins et al., 2014;
Early studies exploring the neurobiological explainability of AI models have mainly focused on visual recognition. Yamins et al. (2014) first examined the similarity between real brain activities and predicted activations from CNN model. The authors trained CNN model to match human performances on various visual recognition tasks. The results showed that the third and the fourth (top) layer of the model could effectively predict the inferior temporal activity recorded with functional MRI during image recognition. Other findings (
In addition to visual recognition, models designed for other utilities also showed similar predicted neurobiological representations with the real activities in the corresponding neural systems. A recent heavily focused area is the neurobiological explainability of AI models for language processing, including syntax processing (
Quantify the progress toward Turing-powerful intelligence
Such demonstration of neurobiological explainability of AI models has opened the door for new contributions from neuroscience, to provide alternative tools to quantitatively evaluate the progress we made toward the Turing-powerful intelligent systems. Normally, evaluation to the distance to such intelligent systems concentrates at the behavioral level, where the performance of models would be evaluated, such as model-model comparison and model-to-human behavior comparison. However, the neurobiological explainability gives us cues to evaluate the brain-likeness of the models, which mainly focused on whether they can solve the same problems as the brain. Evaluation at the both behavioral and neurobiological gives us a more comprehensive insight to evaluate the distance to the Turing-powerful intelligent systems. Besides, the improvements of the algorithm can also indicate the advancement toward the Turing-powerful intelligent systems. To further elaborate on this new role of neuroscience in AI development, here, we capitalize on the
Evaluation at the computational level
In Marr’s theory, the first level, computational level, concerns the problems that models can solve. The evaluation of the performance of the models can be categorized into two ways: model-to-model comparison and model-to-human behavior comparison. The model-to-model comparison literally compares performances of different models for the same task. For instance, Xu et al. (2021) compared supervised models to unsupervised models and found that the latter trained with 10 min of labeled data, could rival the best supervised model trained with 960 h of labeled data. The model-to-human behavior comparison contrasts AI performance to human performance during the same task. For instance, Rajalingham et al. (2018) compared the ANNs’ (Artificial neural networks) accuracy in the visual categorization task with the behavioral results from 1,477 primates (1,472 humans and 5 monkeys), and evaluated that the models could not achieve the human-like behavioral performance.
Evaluation at the algorithmic level
The second level of Marr’s theory, algorithmic level, concerns the processes that models go through. During the exploration into the neurobiological explainability of models, the training methods for models displayed a positive shift, implying that models turned out to be more intelligent. First, the training methods for models in the earlier studies aimed to map the computational models into the corresponding brain activity (Mitchell et al., 2008) when receiving the same stimuli, or to use the brain responses to constrain the models (
Furthermore, the shift of paradigm from supervised to unsupervised models during the prediction of neurobiological representation can also be seen as a step-forward toward brain-like intelligence, since the latter is considered to be more similar to human learning pattern which is constantly exposed to unlabeled environments (Mitchell, 2004), which could even automatically learn the human bias from image classification (Steed and Caliskan, 2021). In earlier studies, models used to predict neurobiological representation were mostly supervised models (
Evaluation at the implementation/physical level
The last level of Marr’s theory, implementation/physical level, concerns the brain-likeness of the models.
First, instantiation (i.e., the neural representation of models) of the brain-inspired model would be an explicit and effective measure for judging success and spurring the progress to the Turing-powerful intelligence. It is an explicit measure since the layers in the models almost correspond to the hierarchical structure of the brain (
Second, the evaluation of models from the perspective of neuroscience further supports the validation of behavioral results. Many studies have indicated that the more brain-like the model is, the better performance the model has in the task. For instance, Yamins et al. (2014) indicated that when a model highly predicts the IT (Inferior temporal) cortex, the better performance it would have in the object recognition task. And the same results were also found in another study (
Third, the evaluation at the behavioral level may not comprehensively explain the brain-like intelligence, as the way to process information differs in the brain and behavior (
Implications for the improvement of AI models
Thus far, we have reviewed the collaboration and separation between neuroscience and AI, and highlighted the significance of the current collaboration. More importantly, we propose the importance of evaluating models from the perspective of neuroscience. The evaluation tells us the closeness between the current models and the brain, which is critical to optimize models in achieving the Turing-powerful level.
To move forward, here, we present an AI-brain loop framework in which we implement the explicit evaluation from neuroscience and accurate modification in each layer and even parameters to the models (Figure 2), inspired by the human-in-the-loop (
FIGURE 2

Schematic of the AI-Brain loop. First, present the same task (e.g., audio recognition) to human subjects and AI models, which are subsequently trained for this task. Second, record the neural activities in the brain by neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fMRI., EEG., MEG., ECoG), and predict neural responses with these trained AI models. Third, compare the recorded neural activity and the artificial neural activity generated by models. Fourth, use the artificial neural activity to fit the neural activity by modifying the corresponding layers or parameters. Fifth, implement the behavioral evaluation of model and see whether the performance achieve the human-like level. If not, implement the continuous fit until it achieves the both human-like and brain-like level.
In this framework, we propose that the AI models trained for specific behavioral task can use neural recordings during the same task as neurobiological reference. Comparisons between recorded and model-predicted neural responses can be used to tune the parameter space of the AI models, and more realistic neurobiological representation of the models can be achieved during the process of minimizing the differences between the two. Lastly, performance of the modified models at behavioral level will be used to verify that whether models with higher brain-likeness level, but also function at the human-like level. Then we also test the modified models at the behavioral level and see whether the performance improves. Such clues of the modification are fundamental to achieve the Turing-powerful intelligent system since it echoes Turing’s claim (Turing, 1936) that models are qualified in not only “mimicking the behavior of the human,” but also “imitating the brain.” The call for Turing-powerful intelligent system asks to look beyond performance optimization, but to focus more on how to achieve higher brain resemblance in future AI models. We believe that re-introducing neuroscience back into AI development through this neurobiological explainability provides a promising opportunity to outbreaking the “black-box” dilemma suffered by most of modern AI models. By “jumping out of the box” and developing more brain-like AI through such AI-brain comparisons, we may eventually leap forward to such ultimate goal.
Statements
Author contributions
YC, ZW, XH, and XZ contributed to the conception of the study. YC and ZW wrote the first draft of the manuscript. YC, ZW, and XH wrote sections of the manuscript. YC, ZW, HG, HL, LG, XH, and XZ contributed to revise the manuscript and customized the tables. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted final versions.
Funding
This work was supported by grants from The Chinese National Programs for Brain Science and Brain-like Intelligence Technology (2021ZD0202101), The National Natural Science Foundation of China (71942003, 32161143022, 32171080, and 31900766), Major Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research, Ministry of Education of China (19JZD010), CAS-VPST Silk Road Science Fund 2021 (GLHZ202128), Collaborative Innovation Program of Hefei Science Center, CAS (2020HSC-CIP001), and Anhui Provincial Key Research and Development Project (202004b11020013).
Acknowledgments
We thank the Bioinformatics Center of the University of Science and Technology of China, School of Life Science, for providing supercomputing resources for this project.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
References
1
ArrietaA. B.Díaz-RodríguezN.Del SerJ.BennetotA.TabikS.BarbadoA.et al (2020). Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI): Concepts, taxonomies, opportunities and challenges toward responsible AI.Inf. Fusion5882–115. 10.1016/j.inffus.2019.12.012
2
BecharaA.DamasioH.TranelD.DamasioA. R. (1997). Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy.Science2751293–1295. 10.1126/science.275.5304.1293
3
BiG. Q.PooM. M. (1998). Synaptic modifications in cultured hippocampal neurons: Dependence on spike timing, synaptic strength, and postsynaptic cell type.J. Neurosci.1810464–10472. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.18-24-10464.1998
4
BurakY.FieteI. R. (2009). Accurate path integration in continuous attractor network models of grid cells.PLoS Comput. Biol.5:e1000291. 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000291
5
CadieuC. F.HongH.YaminsD. L. K.PintoN.ArdilaD.SolomonE. A.et al (2014). Deep neural networks ral the representation of primate IT cortex for core visual object recognition.PLoS Comput. Biol.10:e1003963. 10.1371/JOURNAL.PCBI.1003963
6
CichyR. M.KhoslaA.PantazisD.TorralbaA.OlaA. (2016). Comparison of deep neural networks to spatio-temporal cortical dynamics of human visual object recognition reveals hierarchical correspondence.Sci. Rep.6:27755. 10.1038/srep27755
7
de HeerW. A.HuthA. G.GriffithsT. L.GallantJ. L.TheunissenF. E. (2017). The hierarchical cortical organization of human speech processing.J. Neurosci.376539–6557. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3267-16.2017
8
DengJ.DongW.SocherR.LiL.-J.LiK.Fei-FeiL. (2010). “ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database,” in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, (Miami, FL: IEEE), 248–255. 10.1109/CVPR.2009.5206848
9
EickenbergM.GramfortA.VaroquauxG.ThirionB. (2017). Seeing it all: Convolutional network layers map the function of the human visual system.Neuroimage152184–194. 10.1016/J.NEUROIMAGE.2016.10.001
10
FukushimaT.NixonJ. C. (1980). Analysis of reduced forms of biopterin in biological tissues and fluids.Anal. Biochem.102176–188. 10.1016/0003-2697(80)90336-X
11
GauthierJ.LevyR. P. (2019). “Linking artificial and human neural representations of language,” in Proceedings of the 2019 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing and the 9th international joint conference on natural language processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), (Hong Kong: Association for Computational Linguistics), 529–539. 10.18653/V1/D19-1050
12
GüçlüU.van GervenM. A. J. (2015). Deep neural networks reveal a gradient in the complexity of neural representations across the ventral stream.J. Neurosci.3510005–10014. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5023-14.2015
13
HanJ.MoragaC. (1995). The influence of the sigmoid function parameters on the speed of backpropagation learning.Lect. Notes Comput. Sci.930195–201. 10.1007/3-540-59497-3_175/COVER
14
HassabisD.KumaranD.SummerfieldC.BotvinickM. (2017). Neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence.Neuron95245–258. 10.1016/j.neuron.2017.06.011
15
HintonG. E.SrastavaN.KrizhevskyA.SutskeverI.SalakhutdinovR. R. (2012). Improving neural networks by preventing co-adaptation of feature detectors.arX [Preprint]10.48550/arx.1207.0580
16
HubelD. H.WieselT. N. (1962). Recepte fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat’s visual cortex.J. Physiol.160106–154. 10.1113/JPHYSIOL.1962.SP006837
17
KellA. J. E.YaminsD. L. K.ShookE. N.Norman-HaignereS. V.McDermottJ. H. (2018). A task-optimized neural network replicates human auditory behavior, predicts brain responses, and reveals a cortical processing hierarchy.Neuron98630–644.e16. 10.1016/J.NEURON.2018.03.044
18
KempterR.GerstnerW.van HemmenJ. L. (1999). Hebbian learning and spiking neurons.Phys. Rev. E59:4498. 10.1103/PhysRevE.59.4498
19
Khaligh-RazaviS. M.KriegeskorteN. (2014). Deep supervised, but not unsupervised, models may explain IT cortical representation.PLoS Comput. Biol.10:e1003915. 10.1371/JOURNAL.PCBI.1003915
20
KrizhevskyA.SutskeverI.HintonG. E. (2012). ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks.Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst.251097–1105.
21
LecunY.BengioY.HintonG. (2015). Deep learning.Nature521436–444. 10.1038/nature14539
22
LiW.SadighD.SastryS. S.SeshiaS. A. (2014). Synthesis for human-in-the-loop control systems.Lect. Notes Comput. Sci.8413470–484. 10.1007/978-3-642-54862-8_40/COVER
23
LillicrapT. P.SantoroA.MarrisL.AkermanC. J.HintonG. (2020). Backpropagation and the brain.Nat. Rev. Neurosci.21335–346. 10.1038/s41583-020-0277-3
24
LindsayG. W. (2021). Convolutional neural networks as a model of the visual system: Past, present, and future.J. Cogn. Neurosci.332017–2031. 10.1162/JOCN_A_01544
25
MarrD. (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information.New York, NY: W.H. Freeman and Company.
26
MasquelierT.ThorpeS. J. (2007). Unsupervised learning of visual features through spike timing dependent plasticity.PLoS Comput. Biol.3:e31. 10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030031
27
MitchellT. M. (2004). “The role of unlabeled data in supervised learning,” in Language, knowledge, and representation, Vol. 99edsLarrazabalJ. M.MirandaL. A. P. (Dordrecht: Springer), 103–111. 10.1007/978-1-4020-2783-3_7
28
MitchellT. M.ShinkarevaS. V.CarlsonA.ChangK. M.MalaveV. L.MasonR. A.et al (2008). Predicting human brain actity associated with the meanings of nouns.Science3201191–1195. 10.1126/science.1152876
29
PereiraF.GershmanS.RitterS.BotvinickM. (2016). A comparate evaluation of off-the-shelf distributed semantic representations for modelling behavioural data.Cogn. Neuropsychol.33175–190. 10.1080/02643294.2016.1176907
30
RajalinghamR.IssaE. B.BashanP.KarK.SchmidtK.DiCarloJ. J. (2018). Large-scale, high-resolution comparison of the core visual object recognition behavior of humans, monkeys, and state-of-the-art deep artificial neural networks.J. Neurosci.387255–7269. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0388-18.2018
31
RiesenhuberM.PoggioT. (2000). Models of object recognition.Nat. Neurosci.31199–1204. 10.1038/81479
32
RosenblattF. (1958). The perceptron: A probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain.Psychol. Rev.65386–408. 10.1037/H0042519
33
RoyK.JaiswalA.PandaP. (2019). Towards spike-based machine intelligence with neuromorphic computing.Nature575607–617. 10.1038/s41586-019-1677-2
34
RumelhartD. E.HintonG. E.WilliamsR. J. (1986). Learning representations by back-propagating errors.Nature323533–536. 10.1038/323533a0
35
SchrimpfM.BlankI. A.TuckuteG.KaufC.HosseiniE. A.KanwisherN.et al (2021). The neural architecture of language: Integrate modeling converges on predicte processing.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.118:e2105646118. 10.1073/pnas.2105646118
36
SoonC. S.BrassM.HeinzeH. J.HaynesJ. D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain.Nat. Neurosci.11543–545. 10.1038/nn.2112
37
SteedR.CaliskanA. (2021). “Image representations learned with unsupervised pre-training contain human-like biases,” in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, (Toronto: IEEE), 701–713. 10.1145/3442188.3445932
38
SussilloD.ChurchlandM. M.KaufmanM. T.ShenoyK. V. (2015). A neural network that finds a naturalistic solution for the production of muscle actity.Nat. Neurosci.181025–1033. 10.1038/nn.4042
39
SutskeverI.MartensJ.HintonG. E. (2019). “Generating text with recurrent neural networks,” in Proceedings of the 28th international conference on international conference on machine learning, Bellevue, WA, 1017–1024.
40
TodorovE. (2000). Direct cortical control of muscle actation in voluntary arm movements: A model.Nat. Neurosci.3391–398. 10.1038/73964
41
TuringA. M. (1936). On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.J. Math.58345–363.
42
WalkerE. Y.SinzF. H.CobosE.MuhammadT.FroudarakisE.FaheyP. G.et al (2019). Inception loops discover what excites neurons most using deep predicte models.Nat. Neurosci.222060–2065. 10.1038/s41593-019-0517-x
43
WhittingtonJ. C. R.WarrenJ.BehrensT. E. J. (2021). Relating transformers to models and neural representations of the hippocampal formation.arX [Preprint]10.48550/arx.2112.04035
44
XuQ.BaevskiA.LikhomanenkoT.TomaselloP.ConneauA.CollobertR.et al (2021). “Self-training and pre-training are complementary for speech recognition,” in Proceedings of the ICASSP, IEEE international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing, (Toronto: IEEE), 3030–3034. 10.1109/ICASSP39728.2021.9414641
45
YaminsD. L. K.HongH.CadieuC. F.SolomonE. A.SeibertD.DiCarloJ. J. (2014). Performance-optimized hierarchical models predict neural responses in higher visual cortex.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.1118619–8624. 10.1073/pnas.1403112111
46
ZhuangC.YanS.NayebiA.SchrimpfM.FrankM. C.DiCarloJ. J.et al (2021). Unsupervised neural network models of the ventral visual stream.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.118:e2014196118. 10.1073/PNAS.2014196118/SUPPL_FILE/PNAS.2014196118.SAPP.PDF
Summary
Keywords
artificial intelligence, brain, brain-inspired intelligence, neurobiological explainability, AI evaluation, artificial neural network
Citation
Chen Y, Wei Z, Gou H, Liu H, Gao L, He X and Zhang X (2022) How far is brain-inspired artificial intelligence away from brain?. Front. Neurosci. 16:1096737. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.1096737
Received
12 November 2022
Accepted
24 November 2022
Published
09 December 2022
Volume
16 - 2022
Edited by
Zhiguo Zhang, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
Reviewed by
Yanghua Tian, The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, China; Peng Li, Shenzhen University, China
Updates

Check for updates
Copyright
© 2022 Chen, Wei, Gou, Liu, Gao, He and Zhang.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Li Gao, gaoli@shu.edu.cnXiaosong He, hexs@ustc.edu.cnXiaochu Zhang, zxcustc@ustc.edu.cn
†These authors have contributed equally to this work
This article was submitted to Brain Imaging Methods, a section of the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.