English

Benchmarking Attribute Discrimination in Infant-Scale Vision-Language Models

Machine Learning 2026-05-14 v3

Abstract

Infants learn not only object categories but also fine-grained visual attributes such as color, size, and texture from limited experience. Prior infant-scale vision--language models have mainly been evaluated on object recognition, leaving open whether they support within-class attribute discrimination. We introduce a controlled benchmark that varies color, size, and texture across 67 everyday object classes using synthetic rendering to decouple attribute values from object identity. We evaluate infant-trained models (CVCL and an infant-trained DINO baseline) against web-scale and ImageNet models (CLIP, SigLIP, ResNeXt) under two complementary settings: an image-only prototype test and a text--vision test with attribute--object prompts. We find a dissociation between visual and linguistic attribute information: infant-trained models form strong visual representations for size and discriminate texture comparably to other models, but perform poorly on visual color discrimination, and in the text--vision setting they struggle to ground color and show only modest size grounding. In contrast, web-trained vision--language models strongly ground color from text while exhibiting weaker visual size discrimination.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.18951,
  title  = {Benchmarking Attribute Discrimination in Infant-Scale Vision-Language Models},
  author = {Patrick Batsell and Satoshi Tsutsui and Bihan Wen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.18951},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:35:59.446Z