Shuhao Fu

Taylor W. Webb, Shuhao Fu, Trevor Bihl et al.

Human reasoning is grounded in an ability to identify highly abstract commonalities governing superficially dissimilar visual inputs. Recent efforts to develop algorithms with this capacity have largely focused on approaches that require extensive direct training on visual reasoning tasks, and yield limited generalization to problems with novel content. In contrast, a long tradition of research in cognitive science has focused on elucidating the computational principles underlying human analogical reasoning; however, this work has generally relied on manually constructed representations. Here we present visiPAM (visual Probabilistic Analogical Mapping), a model of visual reasoning that synthesizes these two approaches. VisiPAM employs learned representations derived directly from naturalistic visual inputs, coupled with a similarity-based mapping operation derived from cognitive theories of human reasoning. We show that without any direct training, visiPAM outperforms a state-of-the-art deep learning model on an analogical mapping task. In addition, visiPAM closely matches the pattern of human performance on a novel task involving mapping of 3D objects across disparate categories.

Shuhao Fu, Philip J. Kellman, Hongjing Lu

Both humans and deep learning models can recognize objects from 3D shapes depicted with sparse visual information, such as a set of points randomly sampled from the surfaces of 3D objects (termed a point cloud). Although deep learning models achieve human-like performance in recognizing objects from 3D shapes, it remains unclear whether these models develop 3D shape representations similar to those used by human vision for object recognition. We hypothesize that training with 3D shapes enables models to form representations of local geometric structures in 3D shapes. However, their representations of global 3D object shapes may be limited. We conducted two human experiments systematically manipulating point density and object orientation (Experiment 1), and local geometric structure (Experiment 2). Humans consistently performed well across all experimental conditions. We compared two types of deep learning models, one based on a convolutional neural network (DGCNN) and the other on visual transformers (point transformer), with human performance. We found that the point transformer model provided a better account of human performance than the convolution-based model. The advantage mainly results from the mechanism in the point transformer model that supports hierarchical abstraction of 3D shapes.