How Much Physics Can Vision Learn from Audio? Probing and Distilling Damping Structure
Physical understanding is crucial for decision making, yet vision models struggle to infer properties such as damping that govern how materials behave. Audio encodes such properties directly, because an object's acoustic response to impact reveals its damping through measurable decay. We probe frozen encoders for the quality factor $Q$, a dimensionless measure of how many oscillations an object completes before its ring dies away, and report how well each embedding orders impacts by $Q$ using the Spearman rank correlation $ρ$, for which $ρ=1$ is a perfect ordering and $ρ=0$ an unrelated one. Audio embeddings reach $ρ=0.73$ and retain most of that advantage on materials withheld from train...
| Authors | Zainab Afolabi, Vadim Selyutin, Zhao Gao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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