Paper List
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Macroscopic Dominance from Microscopic Extremes: Symmetry Breaking in Spatial Competition
This paper addresses the fundamental question of how microscopic stochastic advantages in spatial exploration translate into macroscopic resource domi...
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Linear Readout of Neural Manifolds with Continuous Variables
This paper addresses the core challenge of quantifying how the geometric structure of high-dimensional neural population activity (neural manifolds) d...
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Theory of Cell Body Lensing and Phototaxis Sign Reversal in “Eyeless” Mutants of Chlamydomonas
This paper solves the core puzzle of how eyeless mutants of Chlamydomonas exhibit reversed phototaxis by quantitatively modeling the competition betwe...
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Cross-Species Transfer Learning for Electrophysiology-to-Transcriptomics Mapping in Cortical GABAergic Interneurons
This paper addresses the challenge of predicting transcriptomic identity from electrophysiological recordings in human cortical interneurons, where li...
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Uncovering statistical structure in large-scale neural activity with Restricted Boltzmann Machines
This paper addresses the core challenge of modeling large-scale neural population activity (1500-2000 neurons) with interpretable higher-order interac...
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Realizing Common Random Numbers: Event-Keyed Hashing for Causally Valid Stochastic Models
This paper addresses the critical problem that standard stateful PRNG implementations in agent-based models violate causal validity by making random d...
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A Standardized Framework for Evaluating Gene Expression Generative Models
This paper addresses the critical lack of standardized evaluation protocols for single-cell gene expression generative models, where inconsistent metr...
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Single Molecule Localization Microscopy Challenge: A Biologically Inspired Benchmark for Long-Sequence Modeling
This paper addresses the core challenge of evaluating state-space models on biologically realistic, sparse, and stochastic temporal processes, which a...
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.