Ajay Subramanian

PhD student in Cognition & Perception
Department of Psychology
New York University

Research

I am passionate about developing machine learning systems capable of robust, general, human-like visual perception. I have extensive experience in training and evaluating deep learning models, and am also proficient at designing and conducting online human psychophysics experiments. For deep learning, I have primarily used PyTorch and TensorFlow to train both discriminative and generative models (with PyTorch Lightning, Hugging Face Accelerate, Keras) and evaluate them (with ART, model-vs-human, pyrtools). I leverage tools such as lab.js and PsychoPy for human experiment design, and platforms like Prolific, Pavlovia, and Amazon MTurk for participant recruitment and data collection.

Publications

• Benchmarking the speed–accuracy tradeoff in object recognition by humans and neural networks 2025
  Subramanian, A. , Price, S. , Kumbhar, O. , Sizikova, E. , Majaj, N. J. , Pelli, D. G Journal of Vision, 25(1), 4-4
• Spatial-frequency channels, shape bias, and adversarial robustness 2024
  Subramanian, A. , Sizikova, E. , Majaj, N. J. , Pelli, D. G Advances in neural information processing systems (NeurIPS), 36. [Oral presentation]
• Reinforcement learning and its connections with neuroscience and psychology 2022
  Subramanian, A. , Chitlangia, S. , Baths, V Neural Networks, 145, 271-287
• mlGeNN: accelerating SNN inference using GPU-enabled neural networks 2022
  Turner, J. P. , Knight, J. C. , Subramanian, A. , Nowotny, T Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering, 2(2), 024002
• Human Learning of Complex Novel Tasks as Theory-Based Modeling, Exploration, and Planning 2023
  Tsividis, P. , Loula, J. , Burga, J. , Rodriguez, J. P. , Arnaud, S. , Foss, N. , Campero, A. , Subramanian, A. , Pouncy, T. , Gershman, S. , Tenenbaum, J. B Under Review in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.
• Revealing spatial-frequency channels in an ensemble encoding model of human fMRI 2024
  Ozcelik, F. , Subramanian, A. , Majaj, N. J. , Pelli, D. G NeurIPS Workshop on Unifying Representations in Neural Models (UniReps)
• Comparing models of neural representation based on their metric tensors 2023
  Zhou, J. Y. , Chun, C. , Subramanian, A. , Simoncelli, E. , P NeurIPS Workshop on Unifying Representations in Neural Models (UniReps)
• Influence of background on the spatial-frequency channel for object recognition 2024
  Subramanian, A. , Majaj, N. , Pelli, D. G Poster Presentation at Vision Science Society (VSS) Meeting.
• Word2Brain2Image: Visual Reconstruction from Spoken Word Representations 2019
  Subramanian, A. , Patil, R. , Baths, V Poster Presentation at Annual Conference of the Association for Cognitive Science in India (ACCS).