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Main Authors: Sundaram, Shobhita, Fu, Stephanie, Muttenthaler, Lukas, Tamir, Netanel Y., Chai, Lucy, Kornblith, Simon, Darrell, Trevor, Isola, Phillip
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10817
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author Sundaram, Shobhita
Fu, Stephanie
Muttenthaler, Lukas
Tamir, Netanel Y.
Chai, Lucy
Kornblith, Simon
Darrell, Trevor
Isola, Phillip
author_facet Sundaram, Shobhita
Fu, Stephanie
Muttenthaler, Lukas
Tamir, Netanel Y.
Chai, Lucy
Kornblith, Simon
Darrell, Trevor
Isola, Phillip
contents Humans judge perceptual similarity according to diverse visual attributes, including scene layout, subject location, and camera pose. Existing vision models understand a wide range of semantic abstractions but improperly weigh these attributes and thus make inferences misaligned with human perception. While vision representations have previously benefited from alignment in contexts like image generation, the utility of perceptually aligned representations in more general-purpose settings remains unclear. Here, we investigate how aligning vision model representations to human perceptual judgments impacts their usability across diverse computer vision tasks. We finetune state-of-the-art models on human similarity judgments for image triplets and evaluate them across standard vision benchmarks. We find that aligning models to perceptual judgments yields representations that improve upon the original backbones across many downstream tasks, including counting, segmentation, depth estimation, instance retrieval, and retrieval-augmented generation. In addition, we find that performance is widely preserved on other tasks, including specialized out-of-distribution domains such as in medical imaging and 3D environment frames. Our results suggest that injecting an inductive bias about human perceptual knowledge into vision models can contribute to better representations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_10817
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Does Perceptual Alignment Benefit Vision Representations?
Sundaram, Shobhita
Fu, Stephanie
Muttenthaler, Lukas
Tamir, Netanel Y.
Chai, Lucy
Kornblith, Simon
Darrell, Trevor
Isola, Phillip
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Humans judge perceptual similarity according to diverse visual attributes, including scene layout, subject location, and camera pose. Existing vision models understand a wide range of semantic abstractions but improperly weigh these attributes and thus make inferences misaligned with human perception. While vision representations have previously benefited from alignment in contexts like image generation, the utility of perceptually aligned representations in more general-purpose settings remains unclear. Here, we investigate how aligning vision model representations to human perceptual judgments impacts their usability across diverse computer vision tasks. We finetune state-of-the-art models on human similarity judgments for image triplets and evaluate them across standard vision benchmarks. We find that aligning models to perceptual judgments yields representations that improve upon the original backbones across many downstream tasks, including counting, segmentation, depth estimation, instance retrieval, and retrieval-augmented generation. In addition, we find that performance is widely preserved on other tasks, including specialized out-of-distribution domains such as in medical imaging and 3D environment frames. Our results suggest that injecting an inductive bias about human perceptual knowledge into vision models can contribute to better representations.
title When Does Perceptual Alignment Benefit Vision Representations?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10817