Tversky Neural Networks: Psychologically Plausible Deep Learning with Differentiable Tversky Similarity

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission22616 Authors

Keywords: machine learning, psychology, neural networks

TL;DR: A differentiable parameterization of Tversky (1977)'s theory of psychological similarity, and derived neural network building blocks

Abstract:

Work in psychology has highlighted that the geometric model of similarity standard in deep learning is not psychologically plausible because its metric properties such as symmetry do not align with human perception of similarity.
In contrast, (Tversky,1977) proposed an axiomatic theory of similarity with psychological plausibility based on a representation of objects as sets of features, and their similarity as a function of their common and distinctive features.
This model of similarity has not been used in deep learning before, in part because of the challenge of incorporating discrete set operations.
In this paper, we develop a differentiable parameterization of Tversky's similarity that is learnable through gradient descent, and derive basic neural network building blocks such as the \emph{Tversky projection layer}, which unlike the linear projection layer can model non-linear functions such as {\sc xor}.
Through experiments with image recognition and language modeling neural networks, we show that the Tversky projection layer is a beneficial replacement for the linear projection layer. For instance, on the NABirds image classification task, a frozen ResNet-50 adapted with a Tversky projection layer achieves a 24.7\% relative accuracy improvement over the linear layer adapter baseline.
With Tversky projection layers, GPT-2's perplexity on PTB decreases by 7.8\%, and its parameter count by 34.8\%.
Finally, we propose a unified interpretation of both types of projection layers as computing similarities of input stimuli to learned prototypes for which we also propose a novel visualization technique highlighting the interpretability of Tversky projection layers. Our work offers a new paradigm for thinking about the similarity model implicit in modern deep learning, and designing neural networks that are interpretable under an established theory of psychological similarity.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 22616