cs.LGJun 30, 2026

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

Authors: Max WhittonZecheng WangPuchen LiuQuang Tuan TruongShengao WangManaswi YadamreddyOktay OzelVisista Jayanti+7 more

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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