Making neural networks more neural.

Freeman, Alan W · Patterns (N Y) · 2026

basic_science · Level V

Where this comes from

Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are practical and effective but, despite the name, they lack biological validity. The recent study by Kang et al.<sup>1</sup> in <i>Patterns</i> takes a step toward rectifying this deficit by hard-wiring receptive fields into the first layer of a visual DNN, and the authors show that their network can generalize across image types. Training on photographs, for example, resulted in good performance on sketches; conventional DNNs did not match this behavior.