Basic Category Usage in Vision Language Models
Authors: name: Hunter Sawyer; name: Jesse Roberts; name: Kyle Moore
Published: 2025-03-16 14:50:54

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.