Papers › Intriguing properties of generative classifiers
Intriguing properties of generative classifiers
Priyank Jaini, Kevin Clark, Robert Geirhos
What is the best paradigm to recognize objects -- discriminative inference (fast but potentially prone to shortcut learning) or using a generative model (slow but potentially more robust)? We build on recent advances in generative modeling that turn text-to-image models into classifiers. This allows us to study their behavior and to compare them against discriminative models and human psychophysical data. We report four intriguing emergent properties of generative classifiers: they show a record-breaking human-like shape bias (99% for Imagen), near human-level out-of-distribution accuracy, state-of-the-art alignment with human classification errors, and they understand certain perceptual illusions. Our results indicate that while the current dominant paradigm for modeling human object recognition is discriminative inference, zero-shot generative models approximate human object recognition data surprisingly well.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Object Recognition | shape bias | Imagen | shape bias | 98.7 | #1 of 18 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Object Recognition | shape bias | Stable Diffusion | shape bias | 92.7 | #2 of 18 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Object Recognition | shape bias | Parti | shape bias | 91.7 | #3 of 18 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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