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

ICDL 2026

Max Whitton¹, Zecheng Wang^*1, Puchen Liu^*1, Quang Tuan Truong¹, Shengao Wang¹, Manaswi Yadamreddy¹, Oktay Ozel¹, Visista Jayanti¹, Saniya Sekhon¹, Hanna Samuel Tadesse¹, Lawrence Miao¹, Junjie Wang¹, Jiasen Lu², Chen Yu³, Boqing Gong¹

¹ Boston University | ² Apple | ³ The University of Texas at Austin
^* Equal contribution

Paper Code Data (TODO) Model (TODO)

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.

Data Pipeline

Three-stage pipeline to code a large-scale dataset of baby-centric touch events.

Dataset Statistics

Distributions of the coded touch [verb, noun, body part, additional conditions] over our touch annotations.

Data Examples

Examples of [frame, speech transcript, touch ID] triplets (top) and data pairs missing either speech or touch (bottom).

Training

We use a ViT-L architecture. Vision, touch, and text encoders are trained so that representations of the same scene are pushed together while representations of different scenes are pushed apart.

Experiments

Labeled-S: Given a query concept, select the matching frame from a set of candidates.

Picture Vocabulary: Given a spoken word, identify the correct image from four options.

Qualitative Results

Representative pretraining examples (left), and corresponding attention maps of our model (middle) and a baseline model (right).

Quantitative Results

Plots showing the improvement over baseline for picture vocabulary (linear probe) and labeled-s (linear probe and zero-shot).