Paper List
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Translating Measures onto Mechanisms: The Cognitive Relevance of Higher-Order Information
This review addresses the core challenge of translating abstract higher-order information theory metrics (e.g., synergy, redundancy) into defensible, ...
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Emergent Bayesian Behaviour and Optimal Cue Combination in LLMs
This paper addresses the critical gap in understanding whether LLMs spontaneously develop human-like Bayesian strategies for processing uncertain info...
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Vessel Network Topology in Molecular Communication: Insights from Experiments and Theory
This work addresses the critical lack of experimentally validated channel models for molecular communication within complex vessel networks, which is ...
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Modulation of DNA rheology by a transcription factor that forms aging microgels
This work addresses the fundamental question of how the transcription factor NANOG, essential for embryonic stem cell pluripotency, physically regulat...
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Imperfect molecular detection renormalizes apparent kinetic rates in stochastic gene regulatory networks
This paper addresses the core challenge of distinguishing genuine stochastic dynamics of gene regulatory networks from artifacts introduced by imperfe...
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PanFoMa: A Lightweight Foundation Model and Benchmark for Pan-Cancer
This paper addresses the dual challenge of achieving computational efficiency without sacrificing accuracy in whole-transcriptome single-cell represen...
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Beyond Bayesian Inference: The Correlation Integral Likelihood Framework and Gradient Flow Methods for Deterministic Sampling
This paper addresses the core challenge of calibrating complex biological models (e.g., PDEs, agent-based models) with incomplete, noisy, or heterogen...
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Contrastive Deep Learning for Variant Detection in Wastewater Genomic Sequencing
This paper addresses the core challenge of detecting viral variants in wastewater sequencing data without reference genomes or labeled annotations, ov...
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.