Paper List
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Developing the PsyCogMetrics™ AI Lab to Evaluate Large Language Models and Advance Cognitive Science
This paper addresses the critical gap between sophisticated LLM evaluation needs and the lack of accessible, scientifically rigorous platforms that in...
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Equivalence of approximation by networks of single- and multi-spike neurons
This paper resolves the fundamental question of whether single-spike spiking neural networks (SNNs) are inherently less expressive than multi-spike SN...
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The neuroscience of transformers
提出了Transformer架构与皮层柱微环路之间的新颖计算映射,连接了现代AI与神经科学。
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Framing local structural identifiability and observability in terms of parameter-state symmetries
This paper addresses the core challenge of systematically determining which parameters and states in a mechanistic ODE model can be uniquely inferred ...
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Leveraging Phytolith Research using Artificial Intelligence
This paper addresses the critical bottleneck in phytolith research by automating the labor-intensive manual microscopy process through a multimodal AI...
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Neural network-based encoding in free-viewing fMRI with gaze-aware models
This paper addresses the core challenge of building computationally efficient and ecologically valid brain encoding models for naturalistic vision by ...
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Scalable DNA Ternary Full Adder Enabled by a Competitive Blocking Circuit
This paper addresses the core bottleneck of carry information attenuation and limited computational scale in DNA binary adders by introducing a scalab...
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ELISA: An Interpretable Hybrid Generative AI Agent for Expression-Grounded Discovery in Single-Cell Genomics
This paper addresses the critical bottleneck of translating high-dimensional single-cell transcriptomic data into interpretable biological hypotheses ...
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.