How Well Do Deep Learning Models Capture Human Concepts? The Case of the Typicality Effect (2405.16128v1)

Abstract: How well do representations learned by ML models align with those of humans? Here, we consider concept representations learned by deep learning models and evaluate whether they show a fundamental behavioral signature of human concepts, the typicality effect. This is the finding that people judge some instances (e.g., robin) of a category (e.g., Bird) to be more typical than others (e.g., penguin). Recent research looking for human-like typicality effects in language and vision models has focused on models of a single modality, tested only a small number of concepts, and found only modest correlations with human typicality ratings. The current study expands this behavioral evaluation of models by considering a broader range of language (N = 8) and vision (N = 10) model architectures. It also evaluates whether the combined typicality predictions of vision + LLM pairs, as well as a multimodal CLIP-based model, are better aligned with human typicality judgments than those of models of either modality alone. Finally, it evaluates the models across a broader range of concepts (N = 27) than prior studies. There were three important findings. First, LLMs better align with human typicality judgments than vision models. Second, combined language and vision models (e.g., AlexNet + MiniLM) better predict the human typicality data than the best-performing LLM (i.e., MiniLM) or vision model (i.e., ViT-Huge) alone. Third, multimodal models (i.e., CLIP ViT) show promise for explaining human typicality judgments. These results advance the state-of-the-art in aligning the conceptual representations of ML models and humans. A methodological contribution is the creation of a new image set for testing the conceptual alignment of vision models.