A solution to generalized learning from small training sets found in infant repeated visual experiences of individual objects

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ramirez, Frangil, Clerkin, Elizabeth, Crandall, David J., Smith, Linda B.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ramirez, Frangil
Clerkin, Elizabeth
Crandall, David J.
Smith, Linda B.
author_facet Ramirez, Frangil
Clerkin, Elizabeth
Crandall, David J.
Smith, Linda B.
contents One-year-old infants rapidly form and generalize categories of the everyday objects they encounter. Here we provide evidence on infants daily-life visual experiences for 8 early-learned object categories. Using a corpus of infant head-camera images recorded at mealtimes (87 mealtimes captured by 14 infants), we measure the frequency of the unique instances of each category and the variability of the visual experiences of each instance. The distribution of instances is highly skewed, containing, for each infant and category, many images of the same few objects along with fewer images of other instances. Graph theoretic measures of the similarity structure for individual categories reveal a lumpy mix of high similarity and high variability, organized into multiple but interconnected clusters of high-similarity images. In computational experiments, we show that artificially-created training sets characterized by a lumpy distribution of similarities support generalization to novel instances after very few training experiences. We discuss implications for visual object recognition, and for learning more generally, by both humans and machines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_15060
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A solution to generalized learning from small training sets found in infant repeated visual experiences of individual objects
Ramirez, Frangil
Clerkin, Elizabeth
Crandall, David J.
Smith, Linda B.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
One-year-old infants rapidly form and generalize categories of the everyday objects they encounter. Here we provide evidence on infants daily-life visual experiences for 8 early-learned object categories. Using a corpus of infant head-camera images recorded at mealtimes (87 mealtimes captured by 14 infants), we measure the frequency of the unique instances of each category and the variability of the visual experiences of each instance. The distribution of instances is highly skewed, containing, for each infant and category, many images of the same few objects along with fewer images of other instances. Graph theoretic measures of the similarity structure for individual categories reveal a lumpy mix of high similarity and high variability, organized into multiple but interconnected clusters of high-similarity images. In computational experiments, we show that artificially-created training sets characterized by a lumpy distribution of similarities support generalization to novel instances after very few training experiences. We discuss implications for visual object recognition, and for learning more generally, by both humans and machines.
title A solution to generalized learning from small training sets found in infant repeated visual experiences of individual objects
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15060