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Artificial neural network models are able to achieve great performance at numerous computationally challenging tasks like face recognition. It is of significant importance to explore the difference between neural network models and human brains in terms of computational mechanism. This issue has become an experimental focus for some researchers in recent studies, and it is believed that using human behavior to understand neural network models can address this issue. This paper compares the neural network model performance with human performance on a classic yet important task: judging the ethnicity of a given face. This study uses Caucasian and East Asian faces to train 4 neural networks including AlexNet, VGG11, VGG13, and VGG16. Then, the ethnicity judgments of the neural networks are compared with human data using classical psychophysical methods by fitting psychometric curves. The results suggest that VGG11, followed by VGG16, shows a similar response pattern as humans, while simpler AlexNet and more complex VGG13 do not resemble human performance. Thus, this paper explores a new paradigm to compare neural networks and human brains. • Neural networks are able to provide cognitive approaches from face perception. • Human perception is used as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of neural networks. • Neural networks utilizing eye regions are confirmed to be better to perceive faces. • Attentional region analysis would unveil the processing details of a neural network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conditional computing processes an input using only part of the neural network's computational units. Learning to execute parts of a deep convolutional network by routing individual samples has several advantages: This can facilitate the interpretability of the model, reduce the model complexity, and reduce the computational burden during training and inference. Furthermore, if similar classes are routed to the same path, that part of the network learns to discriminate between finer differences and better classification accuracies can be attained with fewer parameters. Recently, several papers have exploited this idea to select a particular child of a node in a tree-shaped network or to skip parts of a network. In this work, we follow a Trellis-based approach for generating specific execution paths in a deep convolutional neural network. We have designed routing mechanisms that use differentiable information gain-based cost functions to determine which subset of features in a convolutional layer will be executed. We call our method Conditional Information Gain Trellis (CIGT). We show that our conditional execution mechanism achieves comparable or better model performance compared to unconditional baselines, using only a fraction of the computational resources. We provide our code and model checkpoints used in the paper at: https://github.com/ufukcbicici/cigt/tree/prl/prl_scripts. • We introduce Conditional Information Gain Trellis (CIGT) for conditional computing. • We derive the CIGT loss function based on classification and information gain losses. • CIGT performs better or comparably using a fraction of the computational resources. • We give tests on MNIST, Fashion MNIST, and CIFAR 10, showing CIGT compares favorably. • Supplementary materials show that semantically similar classes are grouped together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scanning or shooting a document, factors like ink density and paper transparency may cause the content from the reverse side to become visible through the paper, resulting in a digital image with a 'seen-through' phenomenon, which will affect practical applications. In addition, document images can be affected by random factors during the imaging process, such as differences in the performance of camera equipment and variations in the physical properties of the document itself. These random factors increase the noise of the document image and may cause the seen-through phenomena to become more complex and diverse. To tackle this issue, we propose the Fuzzy Diffusion Model (FDM), which combines fuzzy logic with diffusion models. It effectively models complex seen-through effects and handles uncertainties in document images. Specifically, we gradually degrade the original image with mean-reverting stochastic differential equation(SDE) to transform it into seen-through mean state with fixed Gaussian noise version. Following this, fuzzy operations are introduced into the noise network. Which helps the model better learn noise and data distributions by reasoning about the affiliation relationship of each pixel point through fuzzy logic. Eventually, in the reverse process, the low-quality image is gradually restored by simulating the corresponding reverse-time SDE. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on various datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly removes the seen-through effects and achieves good results under several metrics. The proposed FDM effectively solves the seen-through effects of document images and obtains better visual quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]