# Learning to See Through a Baby's Eyes: Early Visual Diets Enable Robust Visual Intelligence in Humans and Machines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14440 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14440/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 96 of its 170 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 96)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Learning to Perceive "Where": Spatial Pretext Tasks for Robust Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09963/) (2026)
- [PRISM: Progressive Reasoning through Iterative Slot Memory for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30942/) (2026)
- [Personalized Emotional Intelligence in Generative AI through Symbolic Affective Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10678/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Newborns perceive the world with low-acuity, color-degraded, and temporally continuous vision, which gradually sharpens as infants develop. To explore the ecological advantages of such staged "visual diets", we train self-supervised learning (SSL) models on object-centric videos under constraints that simulate infant vision: grayscale-to-color (C), blur-to-sharp (A), and preserved temporal continuity (T)-collectively termed CATDiet. For evaluation, we establish a comprehensive benchmark across ten datasets, covering clean and corrupted image recognition, texture-shape cue conflict tests, silhouette recognition, depth-order classification, and the visual cliff paradigm. All CATDiet variants demonstrate enhanced robustness in object recognition, despite being trained solely on object-centric videos. Remarkably, models also exhibit biologically aligned developmental patterns, including neural plasticity changes mirroring synaptic density in macaque V1 and behaviors resembling infants' visual cliff responses. Building on these insights, CombDiet initializes SSL with CATDiet before standard training while preserving temporal continuity. Trained on object-centric or head-mounted infant videos, CombDiet outperforms standard SSL on both in-domain and out-of-domain object recognition and depth perception. Together, these results suggest that the developmental progression of early infant visual experience offers a powerful reverse-engineering framework for understanding the emergence of robust visual intelligence in machines. All code, data, and models are available at Github.