Leveraging Geometric Visual Illusions as Perceptual Inductive Biases for Vision Models

Abstract: 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.