Characterizing the visual representation of objects from the child's view

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Yang, Jane, Sepuri, Tarun, Tan, Alvin Wei Ming, Aw, Khai Loong, Frank, Michael C., Long, Bria
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Yang, Jane
Sepuri, Tarun
Tan, Alvin Wei Ming
Aw, Khai Loong
Frank, Michael C.
Long, Bria
author_facet Yang, Jane
Sepuri, Tarun
Tan, Alvin Wei Ming
Aw, Khai Loong
Frank, Michael C.
Long, Bria
contents Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process look like? We analyzed first-person videos of young children's visual experience at home from the BabyView dataset ($N$ = 31 participants, 868 hours, ages 5--36 months), using a supervised object detection model to extract common object categories from more than 3 million frames. We found that children's object category exposure was highly skewed: a few categories (e.g., cups, chairs) dominated children's visual experiences while most categories appeared rarely, replicating previous findings from a more restricted set of contexts. Category exemplars were highly variable: children encountered objects from unusual angles, in highly cluttered scenes, and partially occluded views; many categories (especially animals) were most frequently viewed as depictions. Surprisingly, despite this variability, detected categories (e.g., giraffes, apples) showed stronger groupings within superordinate categories (e.g., animals, food) relative to groupings derived from canonical photographs of these categories. We found this same pattern when using high-dimensional embeddings from both self-supervised visual and multimodal models; this effect was also recapitulated in densely sampled data from individual children. Understanding the robustness and efficiency of visual category learning will require the development of models that can exploit strong superordinate structure and learn from non-canonical, sparse, and variable exemplars.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_14990
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Characterizing the visual representation of objects from the child's view
Yang, Jane
Sepuri, Tarun
Tan, Alvin Wei Ming
Aw, Khai Loong
Frank, Michael C.
Long, Bria
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process look like? We analyzed first-person videos of young children's visual experience at home from the BabyView dataset ($N$ = 31 participants, 868 hours, ages 5--36 months), using a supervised object detection model to extract common object categories from more than 3 million frames. We found that children's object category exposure was highly skewed: a few categories (e.g., cups, chairs) dominated children's visual experiences while most categories appeared rarely, replicating previous findings from a more restricted set of contexts. Category exemplars were highly variable: children encountered objects from unusual angles, in highly cluttered scenes, and partially occluded views; many categories (especially animals) were most frequently viewed as depictions. Surprisingly, despite this variability, detected categories (e.g., giraffes, apples) showed stronger groupings within superordinate categories (e.g., animals, food) relative to groupings derived from canonical photographs of these categories. We found this same pattern when using high-dimensional embeddings from both self-supervised visual and multimodal models; this effect was also recapitulated in densely sampled data from individual children. Understanding the robustness and efficiency of visual category learning will require the development of models that can exploit strong superordinate structure and learn from non-canonical, sparse, and variable exemplars.
title Characterizing the visual representation of objects from the child's view
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14990