Learning a face space for experiments on human identity

Generative models of human identity and appearance have broad applicability to behavioral science and technology, but the exquisite sensitivity of human face perception means that their utility hinges on the alignment of the model's representation to human psychological representations and the photorealism of the generated images. Meeting these requirements is an exacting task, and existing models of human identity and appearance are often unworkably abstract, artificial, uncanny, or biased. Here, we use a variational autoencoder with an autoregressive decoder to learn a face space from a uniquely diverse dataset of portraits that control much of the variation irrelevant to human identity and appearance. Our method generates photorealistic portraits of fictive identities with a smooth, navigable latent space. We validate our model's alignment with human sensitivities by introducing a psychophysical Turing test for images, which humans mostly fail. Lastly, we demonstrate an initial application of our model to the problem of fast search in mental space to obtain detailed "police sketches" in a small number of trials.Comment: 10 figures. Accepted as a paper to the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018). *JWS and JCP contributed equally to this submissio

Modeling Human Categorization of Natural Images Using Deep Feature Representations

Over the last few decades, psychologists have developed sophisticated formal models of human categorization using simple artificial stimuli. In this paper, we use modern machine learning methods to extend this work into the realm of naturalistic stimuli, enabling human categorization to be studied over the complex visual domain in which it evolved and developed. We show that representations derived from a convolutional neural network can be used to model behavior over a database of >300,000 human natural image classifications, and find that a group of models based on these representations perform well, near the reliability of human judgments. Interestingly, this group includes both exemplar and prototype models, contrasting with the dominance of exemplar models in previous work. We are able to improve the performance of the remaining models by preprocessing neural network representations to more closely capture human similarity judgments.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables. Preliminary work presented at CogSci 201

Learning Hierarchical Visual Representations in Deep Neural Networks Using Hierarchical Linguistic Labels

Modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are able to achieve human-level object classification accuracy on specific tasks, and currently outperform competing models in explaining complex human visual representations. However, the categorization problem is posed differently for these networks than for humans: the accuracy of these networks is evaluated by their ability to identify single labels assigned to each image. These labels often cut arbitrarily across natural psychological taxonomies (e.g., dogs are separated into breeds, but never jointly categorized as "dogs"), and bias the resulting representations. By contrast, it is common for children to hear both "dog" and "Dalmatian" to describe the same stimulus, helping to group perceptually disparate objects (e.g., breeds) into a common mental class. In this work, we train CNN classifiers with multiple labels for each image that correspond to different levels of abstraction, and use this framework to reproduce classic patterns that appear in human generalization behavior.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted as a paper to the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018

Capturing human category representations by sampling in deep feature spaces

Understanding how people represent categories is a core problem in cognitive science. Decades of research have yielded a variety of formal theories of categories, but validating them with naturalistic stimuli is difficult. The challenge is that human category representations cannot be directly observed and running informative experiments with naturalistic stimuli such as images requires a workable representation of these stimuli. Deep neural networks have recently been successful in solving a range of computer vision tasks and provide a way to compactly represent image features. Here, we introduce a method to estimate the structure of human categories that combines ideas from cognitive science and machine learning, blending human-based algorithms with state-of-the-art deep image generators. We provide qualitative and quantitative results as a proof-of-concept for the method's feasibility. Samples drawn from human distributions rival those from state-of-the-art generative models in quality and outperform alternative methods for estimating the structure of human categories.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Accepted as a paper to the 40th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018

Using Machine Learning to Guide Cognitive Modeling: A Case Study in Moral Reasoning

Large-scale behavioral datasets enable researchers to use complex machine learning algorithms to better predict human behavior, yet this increased predictive power does not always lead to a better understanding of the behavior in question. In this paper, we outline a data-driven, iterative procedure that allows cognitive scientists to use machine learning to generate models that are both interpretable and accurate. We demonstrate this method in the domain of moral decision-making, where standard experimental approaches often identify relevant principles that influence human judgments, but fail to generalize these findings to "real world" situations that place these principles in conflict. The recently released Moral Machine dataset allows us to build a powerful model that can predict the outcomes of these conflicts while remaining simple enough to explain the basis behind human decisions.Comment: Camera ready version for Cognitive Science Conferenc

Heterogeneity in susceptibility dictates the order of epidemiological models

The fundamental models of epidemiology describe the progression of an infectious disease through a population using compartmentalized differential equations, but do not incorporate population-level heterogeneity in infection susceptibility. We show that variation strongly influences the rate of infection, while the infection process simultaneously sculpts the susceptibility distribution. These joint dynamics influence the force of infection and are, in turn, influenced by the shape of the initial variability. Intriguingly, we find that certain susceptibility distributions (the exponential and the gamma) are unchanged through the course of the outbreak, and lead naturally to power-law behavior in the force of infection; other distributions often tend towards these "eigen-distributions" through the process of contagion. The power-law behavior fundamentally alters predictions of the long-term infection rate, and suggests that first-order epidemic models that are parameterized in the exponential-like phase may systematically and significantly over-estimate the final severity of the outbreak

Learning deep taxonomic priors for concept learning from few positive examples

Human concept learning is surprisingly robust, allowing forprecise generalizations given only a few positive examples.Bayesian formulations that account for this behavior requireelaborate, pre-specified priors, leaving much of the learningprocess unexplained. More recent models of concept learningbootstrap from deep representations, but the deep neural net-works are themselves trained using millions of positive and neg-ative examples. In machine learning, recent progress in meta-learning has provided large-scale learning algorithms that canlearn new concepts from a few examples, but these approachesstill assume access to implicit negative evidence. In this paper,we formulate a training paradigm that allows a meta-learningalgorithm to solve the problem of concept learning from fewpositive examples. The algorithm discovers a taxonomic prioruseful for learning novel concepts even from held-out supercat-egories and mimics human generalization behavior—the firstto do so without hand-specified domain knowledge or negativeexamples of a novel concept