# Vision Models Predict Urban Scene Appraisal with Limited Neural Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30964 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30964/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Human alignment of neural network representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01201/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning the City : Quantifying Urban Perception At A Global Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01769/) (2016)
- [Urban2Vec: Incorporating Street View Imagery and POIs for Multi-Modal Urban Neighborhood Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11101/) (2020)
- [FaceLift: A transparent deep learning framework to beautify urban scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05961/) (2020)
- [URSimulator: Human-Perception-Driven Prompt Tuning for Enhanced Virtual Urban Renewal via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14589/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pretrained vision embeddings are widely used to model how people appraise urban scenes, and they are validated almost entirely by how well they predict human ratings. Accurate prediction shows that an embedding contains the information needed to recover the ratings. It does not show that the embedding arranges scenes as the human visual system does, which is assumed when distances or dimensions in the embedding are read as perceptual. Using openly released EEG recorded while 63 adults viewed and rated street scenes of Berlin, we compared the neural representational geometry of the scenes with the geometry of pretrained vision models that differ in training objective and size, of simple image descriptors and of the ratings themselves, each relative to a noise ceiling given by the agreement between participants. No feature space reached more than about half of the noise ceiling, which corresponds to about a fifth of the reliable variance in the neural geometry. A descriptor of oriented edge energy reached the level of most pretrained models while capturing a different part of the neural geometry, and deeper layers corresponded to later neural responses. The same embeddings predicted held-out ratings well, up to r = 0.87, yet prediction accuracy and neural correspondence were not reliably related across models, and the best predictor was among the least aligned. Predicting how a street is appraised is therefore weak evidence that a model represents the street as the brain does.