Brain-Score sample model submission

This is the template module, to add your model implementation and submit it to brain-score. It provides examples and template methods for an easy submission. Nonetheless, this is early days, and your submission may fail -- if you get stuck, please reach out to us so we can help.

Getting started

To submit a model to brain-score, the source code has to be submitted as a zip file. The framework will unpack and install the code and its dependencies in a sandboxed environment and execute the brain-score benchmarks on it. One submission can contain multiple models. Once all models are scored on the benchmarks, an email with the results is sent to the submitter. The results will not be made public without approval of the submitter. Additionally the submitted content will not be accessible to any other than the automated benchmark framework, no human will see the implementations without consent.

Setup

There are two options to set up the submission: Either clone this repository and add a model implementation here, or add the required submission modules to an existing repository.

Setup this repository

The submission can contain multiple models. To create a submission follow these steps:

Clone this repository and rename it.
Install the repositories dependencies by executing pip install . in the projects root directory.
Add model implementations to the corresponding file(models/base_model.py or models/brain_model.py). The methods are documented and describe what to add and return. Several example base model implementations are provided for common machine learning libraries in the examples folder.
Add all required libraries to the setup.py. If dependencies are missing, the scoring mechanism will fail.
Run a test run, to see if the scoring mechanism works, by executing the main method in the template module. It will run a mock run of the benchmark process. The test takes a while since it attempts to find the right layers on public data to commit to brain regions.

Add modules to existing project

As a second way you can add the required modules to an existing project. To do so, copy the package models to the existing project. Make sure to add all the dependencies listed in setup.py to the other project. You can check if your submission is correct by executing the main method of the modules in the models directory.

What kind of model do I submit?

Brain-Score accepts two kinds of models. The first type are base models: standard machine learning models that can produce activations in response to stimuli, but do not make any commitments to the brain. The other alternative are brain models, which take a set of stimuli as input and produce brain-region-localized neural firing rates per stimuli.

If you choose to submit a base model, standard mapping procedures wil be applied to convert the base model into a brain model. This entails mapping model layers to brain regions, pixels to degrees visual angle, etc.

Depending on your choice you can implement either the base_model.py or brain_model.py module. If you're not sure what to choose, then the base model is most likely the right choice.

Base models

We provide several base model implementations in the examples folder. The examples work with wrapper classes imported from model-tools. There are more wrapper implementations avaiable in the model-tools/activations package. For more details on how the benchmarking works, see this jupyter notebook. It is located in a repository, containing previously submitted model implementations. This is also a good project to see further examples.

Brain models

To implement a brain model, the instance has to implement the BrainModel interface. An example of how to do that can be seen in this jupyter notebook.

Create zip and submit

Once you are confident your code is correct you are ready to submit. To test weather your project is installable it is recommended to go through the following steps:

Create a new python environment
Go to the project root and call pip install .
Run our checks by executing the main method in either BaseModel.py or BrainModel.py, depending on which you use When the checks run without errors and no further changes your project can be installed on our system. Note: Please double check file loading paths and change them to relative paths. You can NOT rely on the process root being the same as it is for the checks. To avoid problems please work with paths, relative to the current module: os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), '/sth/model_weights.tar') When your project can be successfully installed, you can submit the project by creating a zip file. The file has to contain the projects root directory as a single entry, e.g. as follows:
```
submission.zip
|- alexnet
|-setup.py
|- models
    |- base_models.py
    |- brain_models.py
```

Go to the brain-score website, register and submit your model. Once the results are calculated, you will get an email. Depending on how many models you have specified in one submission, the process will take a while. Please do not submit more than 3 models at a time.

Further documentation sources

The Brain-Score projects are open source and can be freely explored.

The brain-score project itself contains the benchmarking code plus a set of public benchmarks that you can run locally.
The candidate_models project contains standard reference model implementations. This is a good project to explore regarding the model integration.
The model-tools project contains useful helper methods for adding new base models and provides the standard tools to convert them into brain models.