Learning to See Stuff

Mind meets Machine Seminar with Roland Fleming

You are warmly invited to an on-campus talk at Aalto University, Department of Computer Science (Room T5). On 5 November 2025, 14:00–14:45 Professor Roland Fleming (Giessen University) will present “Learning to See Stuff”.

Abstract
Humans are very good at visually recognizing materials and inferring their properties. Without touching surfaces, we can usually tell what they would feel like, and we enjoy vivid visual intuitions about how they typically behave. This is impressive because the retinal image that the visual system receives as input is the result of complex interactions between many physical processes. Somehow the brain has to disentangle these different factors. I will present work in which we show that an unsupervised neural network trained on images of surfaces spontaneously learns to disentangle reflectance, lighting and shape. We find that the network not only predicts the broad successes of human gloss perception, but also the specific pattern of errors that humans exhibit on an image-by-image basis. We argue this has important implications for thinking about vision more broadly.

About the speaker
Roland Fleming is Kurt Koffka Professor of Experimental Psychology at Giessen University, Executive Director of the Center of Mind, Brain and Behavior and head of the Excellence Cluster “The Adaptive Mind”. He studied at Oxford and MIT, and did a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. He has been awarded the Vision Sciences Society Young Investigator Award as well as two ERC Grants (Consolidator and Advanced). In 2022 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.

About the Colloquium
The Mind Meets Machine series is a new monthly forum at Aalto CS that brings together researchers and students across disciplines. We focus on the intersection of mind and technology, from cognitive mechanisms to applied AI, aiming to share cutting-edge research, spark dialogue, and foster collaborations across schools and departments. This meeting is coorganized with MAGICS.