Cognitive Neural Architecture Search Reveals Hierarchical Entailment

Recent neuroscience research has challenged the traditionally assumed hierarchical structure of the ventral visual pathway, suggesting that the brain is more shallow than previously thought. Here, we demonstrate that optimizing convolutional network architectures for brain-alignment via evolutionary neural architecture search results in models with clear representational hierarchies. Despite having random weights, these networks achieve brain-alignment scores surpassing even pretrained classification models, as measured by both regression and representational similarity analysis. Furthermore, through traditional supervised training, architectures optimized for alignment with late ventral regions become competitive classification models. These findings suggest that hierarchical structure is a fundamental mechanism of primate visual processing. Finally, this work demonstrates the potential of neural architecture search as a framework for computational cognitive neuroscience research that could reduce the field's reliance on manually designed convolutional networks.