Benchmarking Out-of-Distribution Generalization Capabilities of DNN-based Encoding Models for the Ventral Visual Cortex

We characterized the generalization capabilities of DNN-based encoding models when predicting neuronal responses from the visual cortex. We collected MacaqueITBench, a large-scale dataset of neural population responses from the macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortex to over $300,000$ images, comprising $8,233$ unique natural images presented to seven monkeys over $109$ sessions. Using MacaqueITBench, we investigated the impact of distribution shifts on models predicting neural activity by dividing the images into Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) train and test splits. The OOD splits included several different image-computable types including image contrast, hue, intensity, temperature, and saturation. Compared to the performance on in-distribution test images -- the conventional way these models have been evaluated -- models performed worse at predicting neuronal responses to out-of-distribution images, retaining as little as $20%$ of the performance on in-distribution test images. The generalization performance under OOD shifts can be well accounted by a simple image similarity metric -- the cosine distance between image representations extracted from a pre-trained object recognition model is a strong predictor of neural predictivity under different distribution shifts. The dataset of images, neuronal firing rate recordings, and computational benchmarks are hosted publicly at: https://bit.ly/3zeutVd.