The curriculum effect in visual learning: the role of readout dimensionality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Generalization of visual perceptual learning (VPL) to unseen conditions varies across tasks. Previous work suggests that training curriculum may be integral to generalization, yet a theoretical explanation is lacking. We propose an explanatory theory of visual learning generalization and curriculum effects by leveraging an artificial neural network (ANN) model of VPL in comparison with humans. We found that easy-to-hard sequential training improved generalization in both humans and ANNs. However, when easy and hard conditions were interleaved, humans and ANNs showed different behaviors: while ANNs performed worse than with sequential training, humans maintained good performance but with large inter-individual variability. Investigating ANN models trained with different curricula, we demonstrated that models relying on low-dimensional neural populations showed superior generalization. This readout subspace dimensionality was directly determined by curriculum: learners who learned from easy tasks early formed lower-dimensional subspaces and generalized better. Our theory provides a mechanistic framework linking curriculum design to VPL generalization through neural population dimensionality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".