Beyond Semantics: Modeling Factual and Affective Perceptual Experiences from Vision-Language Data

Youssef Mohamed; Kenneth Ward Church; Mohamed Elhoseiny

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arXiv · 2606.03345

Beyond Semantics: Modeling Factual and Affective Perceptual Experiences from Vision-Language Data

Youssef Mohamed·Kenneth Ward Church·Mohamed Elhoseiny

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Abstract

We present P-Topics (Perception Topics) modeling, a novel problem for understanding how images are perceived affectively and across cultures. The goal is to (1) discover and model the different perception experiences in a dataset of images and captions, where each experience is defined by an objective factual and a subjective affective aspect, and (2) associate images to their relevant perception experiences. We introduce **PercepT** (**Percep**tion topic **T**ransformer), a two-stage architecture that tackles P-Topics modeling. In the formation stage, percepT discovers *P-Topics* as visual-textual clusters using an unsupervised training objective, and dynamically selects the number of clusters to match the perceptual richness of the dataset. In the mapping stage, it learns *P-Topic mapping functions* via attention pooling to associate images to their respective clusters. On ArtELingo, PercepT achieves a silhouette score of **0.97** compared to **0.37** from the closest baseline reflecting better perceptual clusters. PercepT also achieves an AUC score of **0.94** compared to **0.77** showing better mapping to perceptual clusters. Human evaluation confirms that PercepT captures semantically meaningful perception experiences and significantly outperforms existing methods. Our implementation will be made public.

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Youssef Mohamed, Kenneth Ward Church, Mohamed Elhoseiny. 2026-06-02. Beyond Semantics: Modeling Factual and Affective Perceptual Experiences from Vision-Language Data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03345

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