Making Sense of Touch from the Child's View for Contrastive Learning
Max Whitton, Zecheng Wang, Puchen Liu, Quang Tuan Truong, Shengao Wang, Manaswi Yadamreddy, Oktay Ozel, Visista Jayanti, Saniya Sekhon, Hanna Samuel Tadesse, Lawrence Miao, Junjie Wang, Jiasen Lu, Chen Yu, Boqing Gong
Abstract
Is the sense of touch a mechanism for human babies' learning of visual concepts? If so, can we quantify its importance, and to what extent do babies rely on their sense of touch for visual learning? To approach these questions in a principled way, we propose a structured coding system for baby-centric touch events, yielding a dataset of 264k two-second clips of touch events coded according to this system. Using this dataset, we pretrain developmentally grounded models that reveal promising insights into the nature of baby learning from touch.
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