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arxiv:2503.12530

Basic Category Usage in Vision Language Models

Published on Mar 16
· Submitted by JesseTNRoberts on Mar 18

Abstract

The field of psychology has long recognized a basic level of categorization that humans use when labeling visual stimuli, a term coined by Rosch in 1976. This level of categorization has been found to be used most frequently, to have higher information density, and to aid in visual language tasks with priming in humans. Here, we investigate basic level categorization in two recently released, open-source vision-language models (VLMs). This paper demonstrates that Llama 3.2 Vision Instruct (11B) and Molmo 7B-D both prefer basic level categorization consistent with human behavior. Moreover, the models' preferences are consistent with nuanced human behaviors like the biological versus non-biological basic level effects and the well established expert basic level shift, further suggesting that VLMs acquire cognitive categorization behaviors from the human data on which they are trained.

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Do large vision models categorize things at the basic level as we see humans do? We find that VLLMs show basic level preference, shift away from the basic level when influenced by expert prompting, and have a biological/non-biological interference pattern that all follow the well established results in the cognitive science literature.

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