English

Making Sense of Touch from the Child's View for Contrastive Learning

Machine Learning 2026-06-30 v1
Authors: 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
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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.

Keywords

contrastive learning touch sensing cognitive development self-supervised learning multimodal learning developmental robotics

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.31943,
  title  = {Making Sense of Touch from the Child's View for Contrastive Learning},
  author = {Max Whitton and Zecheng Wang and Puchen Liu and Quang Tuan Truong and Shengao Wang and Manaswi Yadamreddy and Oktay Ozel and Visista Jayanti and Saniya Sekhon and Hanna Samuel Tadesse and Lawrence Miao and Junjie Wang and Jiasen Lu and Chen Yu and Boqing Gong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.31943},
  year   = {2026}
}