Understanding the Limits of Vision Language Models Through the Lens of the Binding Problem

Recent work has documented striking heterogeneity in the performance of state-of-the-art vision language models (VLMs), including both multimodal language models and text-to-image models. These models are able to describe and generate a diverse array of complex, naturalistic images, yet they exhibit surprising failures on basic multi-object reasoning tasks -- such as counting, localization, and simple forms of visual analogy -- that humans perform with near perfect accuracy. To better understand this puzzling pattern of successes and failures, we turn to theoretical accounts of the binding problem in cognitive science and neuroscience, a fundamental problem that arises when a shared set of representational resources must be used to represent distinct entities (e.g., to represent multiple objects in an image), necessitating the use of serial processing to avoid interference. We find that many of the puzzling failures of state-of-the-art VLMs can be explained as arising due to the binding problem, and that these failure modes are strikingly similar to the limitations exhibited by rapid, feedforward processing in the human brain.

Using Contrastive Learning with Generative Similarity to Learn Spaces that Capture Human Inductive Biases

Humans rely on strong inductive biases to learn from few examples and abstract useful information from sensory data. Instilling such biases in machine learning models has been shown to improve their performance on various benchmarks including few-shot learning, robustness, and alignment. However, finding effective training procedures to achieve that goal can be challenging as psychologically-rich training data such as human similarity judgments are expensive to scale, and Bayesian models of human inductive biases are often intractable for complex, realistic domains. Here, we address this challenge by introducing a Bayesian notion of generative similarity whereby two datapoints are considered similar if they are likely to have been sampled from the same distribution. This measure can be applied to complex generative processes, including probabilistic programs. We show that generative similarity can be used to define a contrastive learning objective even when its exact form is intractable, enabling learning of spatial embeddings that express specific inductive biases. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by showing how it can be used to capture human inductive biases for geometric shapes, and to better distinguish different abstract drawing styles that are parameterized by probabilistic programs.

A Relational Inductive Bias for Dimensional Abstraction in Neural Networks

The human cognitive system exhibits remarkable flexibility and generalization capabilities, partly due to its ability to form low-dimensional, compositional representations of the environment. In contrast, standard neural network architectures often struggle with abstract reasoning tasks, overfitting, and requiring extensive data for training. This paper investigates the impact of the relational bottleneck -- a mechanism that focuses processing on relations among inputs -- on the learning of factorized representations conducive to compositional coding and the attendant flexibility of processing. We demonstrate that such a bottleneck not only improves generalization and learning efficiency, but also aligns network performance with human-like behavioral biases. Networks trained with the relational bottleneck developed orthogonal representations of feature dimensions latent in the dataset, reflecting the factorized structure thought to underlie human cognitive flexibility. Moreover, the relational network mimics human biases towards regularity without pre-specified symbolic primitives, suggesting that the bottleneck fosters the emergence of abstract representations that confer flexibility akin to symbols.

Comparing Abstraction in Humans and Large Language Models Using Multimodal Serial Reproduction

Humans extract useful abstractions of the world from noisy sensory data. Serial reproduction allows us to study how people construe the world through a paradigm similar to the game of telephone, where one person observes a stimulus and reproduces it for the next to form a chain of reproductions. Past serial reproduction experiments typically employ a single sensory modality, but humans often communicate abstractions of the world to each other through language. To investigate the effect language on the formation of abstractions, we implement a novel multimodal serial reproduction framework by asking people who receive a visual stimulus to reproduce it in a linguistic format, and vice versa. We ran unimodal and multimodal chains with both humans and GPT-4 and find that adding language as a modality has a larger effect on human reproductions than GPT-4's. This suggests human visual and linguistic representations are more dissociable than those of GPT-4.

Human-Like Geometric Abstraction in Large Pre-trained Neural Networks

Humans possess a remarkable capacity to recognize and manipulate abstract structure, which is especially apparent in the domain of geometry. Recent research in cognitive science suggests neural networks do not share this capacity, concluding that human geometric abilities come from discrete symbolic structure in human mental representations. However, progress in artificial intelligence (AI) suggests that neural networks begin to demonstrate more human-like reasoning after scaling up standard architectures in both model size and amount of training data. In this study, we revisit empirical results in cognitive science on geometric visual processing and identify three key biases in geometric visual processing: a sensitivity towards complexity, regularity, and the perception of parts and relations. We test tasks from the literature that probe these biases in humans and find that large pre-trained neural network models used in AI demonstrate more human-like abstract geometric processing.

The Relational Bottleneck as an Inductive Bias for Efficient Abstraction

A central challenge for cognitive science is to explain how abstract concepts are acquired from limited experience. This effort has often been framed in terms of a dichotomy between empiricist and nativist approaches, most recently embodied by debates concerning deep neural networks and symbolic cognitive models. Here, we highlight a recently emerging line of work that suggests a novel reconciliation of these approaches, by exploiting an inductive bias that we term the relational bottleneck. We review a family of models that employ this approach to induce abstractions in a data-efficient manner, emphasizing their potential as candidate models for the acquisition of abstract concepts in the human mind and brain.