Paper List
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A Unified Variational Principle for Branching Transport Networks: Wave Impedance, Viscous Flow, and Tissue Metabolism
This paper solves the core problem of predicting the empirically observed branching exponent (α≈2.7) in mammalian arterial trees, which neither Murray...
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Household Bubbling Strategies for Epidemic Control and Social Connectivity
This paper addresses the core challenge of designing household merging (social bubble) strategies that effectively control epidemic risk while maximiz...
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Empowering Chemical Structures with Biological Insights for Scalable Phenotypic Virtual Screening
This paper addresses the core challenge of bridging the gap between scalable chemical structure screening and biologically informative but resource-in...
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A mechanical bifurcation constrains the evolution of cell sheet folding in the family Volvocaceae
This paper addresses the core problem of why there is an evolutionary gap in species with intermediate cell numbers (e.g., 256 cells) in Volvocaceae, ...
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Bayesian Inference in Epidemic Modelling: A Beginner’s Guide Illustrated with the SIR Model
This guide addresses the core challenge of estimating uncertain epidemiological parameters (like transmission and recovery rates) from noisy, real-wor...
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Geometric framework for biological evolution
This paper addresses the fundamental challenge of developing a coordinate-independent, geometric description of evolutionary dynamics that bridges gen...
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A multiscale discrete-to-continuum framework for structured population models
This paper addresses the core challenge of systematically deriving uniformly valid continuum approximations from discrete structured population models...
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Whole slide and microscopy image analysis with QuPath and OMERO
使QuPath能够直接分析存储在OMERO服务器中的图像而无需下载整个数据集,克服了大规模研究的本地存储限制。
Human-like Object Grouping in Self-supervised Vision Transformers
Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University | Department of Social Science and AI, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies | Nanyang Technological University | University of Hong Kong | Stony Brook University
30秒速读
IN SHORT: This paper addresses the core challenge of quantifying how well self-supervised vision models capture human-like object grouping in natural scenes, bridging the gap between computational representations and behavioral psychophysics.
核心创新
- Methodology Introduces a large-scale behavioral benchmark (1,020 trials) scaling up classical psychophysics to natural images, enabling quantitative comparison between model representations and human object perception.
- Methodology Proposes a novel object-centric metric based on ROC analysis of patch-level affinity maps that quantifies object boundary alignment without requiring object-level supervision.
- Biology Demonstrates that Gram matrix structure, capturing patch similarity patterns, is a key mechanism driving perceptual alignment between self-supervised models and human vision.
主要结论
- Self-supervised Transformer models trained with DINO objectives show strongest alignment with human behavior, with DINOv3 ViT-B achieving 91.9% grouping accuracy and highest noise-normalized Spearman correlation (Fig. 4A).
- Object-centric structure in patch representations, quantified by ROC AUC, strongly predicts behavioral alignment across models (correlation shown in Fig. 6B), with DINO-based models consistently outperforming supervised counterparts.
- Gram matrix distillation improves supervised models' alignment with human behavior, converging with independent evidence that Gram anchoring enhances DINOv3's feature quality.
摘要: Vision foundation models trained with self-supervised objectives achieve strong performance across diverse tasks and exhibit emergent object segmentation properties. However, their alignment with human object perception remains poorly understood. Here, we introduce a behavioral benchmark in which participants make same/different object judgments for dot pairs on naturalistic scenes, scaling up a classical psychophysics paradigm to over 1000 trials. We test a diverse set of vision models using a simple readout from their representations to predict subjects’ reaction times. We observe a steady improvement across model generations, with both architecture and training objective contributing to alignment, and transformer-based models trained with the DINO self-supervised objective showing the strongest performance. To investigate the source of this improvement, we propose a novel metric to quantify the object-centric component of representations by measuring patch similarity within and between objects. Across models, stronger object-centric structure predicts human segmentation behavior more accurately. We further show that matching the Gram matrix of supervised transformer models, capturing similarity structure across image patches, with that of a self-supervised model through distillation improves their alignment with human behavior, converging with the prior finding that Gram anchoring improves DINOv3’s feature quality. Together, these results demonstrate that self-supervised vision models capture object structure in a behaviorally human-like manner, and that Gram matrix structure plays a role in driving perceptual alignment.