# Predictive Attention Mechanism

> As a demonstration of an attention mechanism, researchers demonstrated a system that can reconstruct the images that a monkey saw from brain activity.

By [Ryan Porter](https://anth.us/ryan) · Published 2024-07-05

Canonical: https://anth.us/articles/predictive-attention-mechanism/

As a demonstration of an attention mechanism, researchers at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands demonstrated a system that can reconstruct the images that a monkey saw from brain activity in [*PAM: Predictive Attention Mechanism for Neural Decoding of Visual Perception*](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.04.596589v1).

::image{
  src="images/posts/predictive-attention-mechanism-neural-decoding.png"
  alt="A system that can reconstruct what a monkey saw from brain activity."
}

The top row of images is what the monkey saw.

The bottom row of images were reconstructed by a deep neural network from monkey brain activity.

::image{
  src="images/posts/predictive-attention-mechanism-latent-inversion.png"
  alt="Using latent inversion to generate images."
}

Lower loss values to the left.  The one on the far left looks nearly perfect.