Connectome-constrained fly vision model put through stress tests: mechanistic claims shift with intervention and trained solution
Stress-testing the 50 trained solutions of the fly vision model flyvis shows that a connectome constraint does not make mechanistic conclusions unique: reverse-phi reversal also appears in task-matched causal CNNs, attribution effect sizes agree with exhaustive single-connection ground truth only when matched to the intervention, and only 25 of 50 models meet a T4/T5 tuning criterion. The value of the constraint is that mechanistic hypotheses become directly testable, not that a mechanism is unique.