Learning Through Little Eyes: Attribute Discrimination Beyond Objects

Abstract: Infants learn to recognize not only object categories but also fine grained attributes such as color, size, and texture within their first two years of life. Prior work explores Childs View for Contrastive Learning (CVCL), a CLIP style model trained on infant egocentric video as a computational model of early infant learning, but it focuses only on class level recognition. This leaves it unclear whether infant scale learning also supports attribute discrimination. To address this, we introduce a benchmark that systematically varies color, size, and texture, allowing controlled tests of within class attribute recognition. Comparing CVCL with CLIP shows clear differences. CVCL is better at size discrimination, while CLIP achieves higher accuracy on color discrimination. Both models represent texture in image embeddings but fail to ground texture linguistically, suggesting a gap between visual and language spaces.