arXiv Computer Vision

Relational Knowledge Distillation Brings DNN Representations Close Enough to Humans to Be Aligned Without Supervision

The study investigates whether transferring relational structure from human mental representations to deep neural networks (DNNs) can improve fine‑grained alignment between the two. Using unsupervised Gromov‑Wasserstein optimal transport, the authors show that fine‑tuning pre‑trained DNNs with Relational Knowledge Distillation (RKD) brings the networks close enough to human representations to align at the individual‑object level on a test set of concepts not seen during training. The improvement is driven mainly by a more human‑like global structure of category distances, while local nearest‑neighbor overlap remains largely unchanged.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 19

Alignment of visual brain encoding models with individual perceptual similarity judgments

The study explores how to fine‑tune visual brain encoding models so that their internal representations better match individual human perceptual similarity judgments. Using similarity data from 100 images collected from eight participants in the Natural Scenes Dataset, the authors adapted a generic similarity model (DreamSim) to create personalized perceptual similarity models for each subject. They then fine‑tuned each participant’s baseline encoder with either generic or personalized similarity information, finding that models trained with personalized judgments were most aligned with human perceptual similarity and preserved inter‑subject correlations of those judgments.

By Daniel Chong, Haomiao Chen, Keith W Jamison, Raja Marjieh, Ilia Sucholutsky, Nori Jacoby, Amy Kuceyeski
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Model Specific Task Similarity for Vision Language Model Selection via Layer Conductance

The paper introduces a method for selecting the best vision‑language model for a downstream task by analyzing the internal dynamics of the visual encoder. It represents each task with layer‑wise conductance and uses an entropy‑regularized alignment to derive a target‑conditioned block importance distribution. The proposed Directional Conductance Divergence (DCD) metric captures asymmetric transferability, enabling accurate prediction of model rankings without direct inference, and achieves a 14.7% NDCG@5 improvement over SWAB on 48 VLMs across 21 datasets.

By Wei Yang, Hong Xie, Tao Tan, Xin Li, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Modeling The Object Representations Underlying Human Physical Reasoning

The study investigates how vision models represent objects compared to humans during physical reasoning tasks. By comparing segmentation outputs from several architectures (DINOv2, SegFormer, DeepLabV3+, UPerNet) to human behavior in time‑to‑collision and change‑detection tasks, the authors find that briefly trained models are too coarse, fully trained models are too fine, and an intermediate training stage best matches the coarse, volumetric bodies humans use. Larger models reach this intermediate alignment earlier, suggesting that resource constraints drive the emergence of human‑like representations in general‑purpose vision systems.

By Andrey Gizdov, Andrea Procopio, Lorenzo Caputi, Georgi I. Ivanov, Yichen Li, Daniel Harari, Tomer Ullman