Can Transformers Smell Like Humans?

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Taleb, Farzaneh, Vasco, Miguel, Ribeiro, Antônio H., Björkman, Mårten, Kragic, Danica
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866929577043951616
author Taleb, Farzaneh
Vasco, Miguel
Ribeiro, Antônio H.
Björkman, Mårten
Kragic, Danica
author_facet Taleb, Farzaneh
Vasco, Miguel
Ribeiro, Antônio H.
Björkman, Mårten
Kragic, Danica
contents The human brain encodes stimuli from the environment into representations that form a sensory perception of the world. Despite recent advances in understanding visual and auditory perception, olfactory perception remains an under-explored topic in the machine learning community due to the lack of large-scale datasets annotated with labels of human olfactory perception. In this work, we ask the question of whether pre-trained transformer models of chemical structures encode representations that are aligned with human olfactory perception, i.e., can transformers smell like humans? We demonstrate that representations encoded from transformers pre-trained on general chemical structures are highly aligned with human olfactory perception. We use multiple datasets and different types of perceptual representations to show that the representations encoded by transformer models are able to predict: (i) labels associated with odorants provided by experts; (ii) continuous ratings provided by human participants with respect to pre-defined descriptors; and (iii) similarity ratings between odorants provided by human participants. Finally, we evaluate the extent to which this alignment is associated with physicochemical features of odorants known to be relevant for olfactory decoding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_03038
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Transformers Smell Like Humans?
Taleb, Farzaneh
Vasco, Miguel
Ribeiro, Antônio H.
Björkman, Mårten
Kragic, Danica
Machine Learning
The human brain encodes stimuli from the environment into representations that form a sensory perception of the world. Despite recent advances in understanding visual and auditory perception, olfactory perception remains an under-explored topic in the machine learning community due to the lack of large-scale datasets annotated with labels of human olfactory perception. In this work, we ask the question of whether pre-trained transformer models of chemical structures encode representations that are aligned with human olfactory perception, i.e., can transformers smell like humans? We demonstrate that representations encoded from transformers pre-trained on general chemical structures are highly aligned with human olfactory perception. We use multiple datasets and different types of perceptual representations to show that the representations encoded by transformer models are able to predict: (i) labels associated with odorants provided by experts; (ii) continuous ratings provided by human participants with respect to pre-defined descriptors; and (iii) similarity ratings between odorants provided by human participants. Finally, we evaluate the extent to which this alignment is associated with physicochemical features of odorants known to be relevant for olfactory decoding.
title Can Transformers Smell Like Humans?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03038