The relationship between perception and inference, as postulated by Helmholtz in the 19th century, is paralleled in modern machine learning by generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and their hierarchical variants. Here, we evaluate the role of hierarchical inference and its alignment with brain function in the domain of motion perception. We first introduce a novel synthetic data framework, Retinal Optic Flow Learning (ROFL), which enables control over motion statistics and their causes. We then present a new hierarchical VAE and test it against alternative models on two downstream tasks: (i) predicting ground truth causes of retinal optic flow (e.g., self-motion); and (ii) predicting the responses of neurons in the motion processing pathway of primates. We manipulate the model architectures (hierarchical versus non-hierarchical), loss functions, and the causal structure of the motion stimuli. We find that hierarchical latent structure in the model leads to several improvements. First, it improves the linear decodability of ground truth factors and does so in a sparse and disentangled manner. Second, our hierarchical VAE outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in predicting neuronal responses and exhibits sparse latent-to-neuron relationships. These results depend on the causal structure of the world, indicating that alignment between brains and artificial neural networks depends not only on architecture but also on matching ecologically relevant stimulus statistics. Taken together, our results suggest that hierarchical Bayesian inference underlines the brain's understanding of the world, and hierarchical VAEs can effectively model this understanding.
