Aligning MLLMs with the Latent Structure of Human Cognition via Behavior-Derived Semantic Dimensions
TL;DR
A novel framework to align MLLMs with the multidimensional mental representations underlying human similarity judgements, which builds on a previously established behavior-derived semantic embedding space and points to a data-driven route for incorporating human cognitive structure into MLLMs alignment.
Abstract
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a wide range of reasoning tasks, yet it remains unclear whether their internal representations and decision criteria align with the latent structure of human cognition. In this work, we propose a novel framework to align MLLMs with the multidimensional mental representations underlying human similarity judgements. We build on a previously established behavior-derived semantic embedding space, in which objects are represented along 66 interpretable dimensions derived from 4.70 million human Odd-One-Out (O1O) judgements. For each triplet, we infer the most salient decision dimension and convert it into a dimension-grounded linguistic rationale. This enables MLLMs to learn both the final choice and a justification consistent with the inferred behavioral criterion. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves model consistency with human similarity judgements while retaining competitive performance on standard multimodal benchmarks. Furthermore, using searchlight Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) on an independent fMRI Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD), we observe increased representational alignment between model and human. Ultimately, our findings point to a data-driven route for incorporating human cognitive structure into MLLMs alignment. The code is available \href{https://github.com/ening-open/cogalign}{here}.
