Paper List
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Nyxus: A Next Generation Image Feature Extraction Library for the Big Data and AI Era
This paper addresses the core pain point of efficiently extracting standardized, comparable features from massive (terabyte to petabyte-scale) biomedi...
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Topological Enhancement of Protein Kinetic Stability
This work addresses the long-standing puzzle of why knotted proteins exist by demonstrating that deep knots provide a functional advantage through enh...
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A Multi-Label Temporal Convolutional Framework for Transcription Factor Binding Characterization
This paper addresses the critical limitation of existing TF binding prediction methods that treat transcription factors as independent entities, faili...
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Social Distancing Equilibria in Games under Conventional SI Dynamics
This paper solves the core problem of proving the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibria in finite-duration SI epidemic games, showing they are a...
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Binding Free Energies without Alchemy
This paper addresses the core bottleneck of computational expense in Absolute Binding Free Energy calculations by eliminating the need for numerous al...
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SHREC: A Spectral Embedding-Based Approach for Ab-Initio Reconstruction of Helical Molecules
This paper addresses the core bottleneck in cryo-EM helical reconstruction: eliminating the dependency on accurate initial symmetry parameter estimati...
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Budget-Sensitive Discovery Scoring: A Formally Verified Framework for Evaluating AI-Guided Scientific Selection
This paper addresses the critical gap in evaluating AI-guided scientific selection strategies under realistic budget constraints, where existing metri...
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Probabilistic Joint and Individual Variation Explained (ProJIVE) for Data Integration
This paper addresses the core challenge of accurately decomposing shared (joint) and dataset-specific (individual) sources of variation in multi-modal...
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.