# Leveraging Geometric Visual Illusions as Perceptual Inductive Biases for Vision Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15156 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15156/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01136/) (2021)
- [ResNet strikes back: An improved training procedure in timm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00476/) (2021)
- [UniCLIP: Unified Framework for Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13430/) (2022)
- [Prediction of Dashed Caf'e Wall illusion by the Classical Receptive Field Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03739/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contemporary deep learning models have achieved impressive performance in image classification by primarily leveraging statistical regularities within large datasets, but they rarely incorporate structured insights drawn directly from perceptual psychology. To explore the potential of perceptually motivated inductive biases, we propose integrating classic geometric visual illusions well-studied phenomena from human perception into standard image-classification training pipelines. Specifically, we introduce a synthetic, parametric geometric-illusion dataset and evaluate three multi-source learning strategies that combine illusion recognition tasks with ImageNet classification objectives. Our experiments reveal two key conceptual insights: (i) incorporating geometric illusions as auxiliary supervision systematically improves generalization, especially in visually challenging cases involving intricate contours and fine textures; and (ii) perceptually driven inductive biases, even when derived from synthetic stimuli traditionally considered unrelated to natural image recognition, can enhance the structural sensitivity of both CNN and transformer-based architectures. These results demonstrate a novel integration of perceptual science and machine learning and suggest new directions for embedding perceptual priors into vision model design.