When Visual Evidence is Ambiguous: Pareidolia as a Diagnostic Probe for Vision Models
When visual evidence is ambiguous, vision models must decide how to interpret face-like patterns. Face pareidolia, the perception of faces in non-face objects, provides a controlled probe of such decisions. We introduce a diagnostic framework that analyzes detection, localization, uncertainty and bias across class, difficulty and emotion. We evaluate six models spanning four representational regimes: vision-language models (VLMs; CLIP-B/32, CLIP-L/14, LLaVA-1.5-7B), pure vision classification (ViT), object detection (YOLOv8), and face detection (RetinaFace). Our results reveal that uncertainty and bias are decoupled: low uncertainty can signal either safe suppression, as in detectors, or ...
| Authors | Qianpu Chen, Derya Soydaner, Rob Saunders |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 4 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 July 2026 |
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