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 Machine Learning
Oct 19

Domain-specific language alignment of multimodal embeddings towards explainable predictions

The paper introduces a framework that aligns multimodal embeddings with language by using captioning functions on interpretable auxiliary data, a soft contrastive loss, and a rank-based concept retrieval task. Applied to Earth observation embeddings, the method improves species distribution modelling, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on most metrics and better concept retrieval than prior vision‑language models. The aligned concepts enable recovery of species‑habitat associations and allow domain experts to interpret model predictions in natural language.

By Gabriel\.e Tij\=unaityt\.e, Thijs L. van der Plas, Mohamed-Bachir Belaid, Rob Knapen, Maciej J. Soja, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis