Object Detection, Recognition, Deep Learning, and the Universal Law of Generalization

Abstract: Object detection and recognition are fundamental functions underlying the success of species. Because the appearance of an object exhibits a large variability, the brain has to group these different stimuli under the same object identity, a process of generalization. Does the process of generalization follow some general principles or is it an ad-hoc "bag-of-tricks"? The Universal Law of Generalization provided evidence that generalization follows similar properties across a variety of species and tasks. Here we test the hypothesis that the internal representations underlying generalization reflect the natural properties of object detection and recognition in our environment rather than the specifics of the system solving these problems. By training a deep-neural-network with images of "clear" and "camouflaged" animals, we found that with a proper choice of category prototypes, the generalization functions are monotone decreasing, similar to the generalization functions of biological systems. Our findings support the hypothesis of the study.