Do AI Systems Organize Information Like the Human Brain?

Determine whether modern artificial neural networks organize information in a manner consistent with the human brain’s functional organization of information processing.

Background

The paper motivates a unified framework for comparing AI models and the human brain by noting that existing brain–AI alignment studies largely rely on stimulus-bound comparisons, which restrict cross-modality and cross-task analysis. This limitation leaves a fundamental question unresolved: whether artificial systems share the brain’s intrinsic organizational logic.

To address this, the authors introduce the Brain-like Space, a graph-theoretic mapping from model attention topologies to canonical human functional brain networks, enabling comparisons across 151 Transformer-based models spanning language, vision, and multimodal architectures. The explicit open question—whether AI systems organize information as the brain does—serves as the overarching motivation for this framework and its empirical analyses.