A Newborn Embodied Turing Test for Comparing Object Segmentation Across Animals and Machines

Newborn brains rapidly learn to solve challenging object perception tasks, including segmenting objects from backgrounds and recognizing objects across new viewing situations. Conversely, modern machine learning (ML) algorithms are "data hungry," requiring more training data than brains to reach similar performance levels. How do we close this learning gap between brains and machines? Here, we introduce a new benchmark-a Newborn Embodied Turing Test (NETT) for object segmentation-in which newborn animals and machines are raised in the same environments and tested with the same tasks, permitting direct comparison of their learning. First, newborn chicks were raised in controlled environments containing a single object rotating on a single background, then their recognition performance was tested across new backgrounds and viewpoints. Second, we performed "digital twin" experiments in which artificial agents were reared and tested in virtual environments that mimicked the rearing and testing conditions of the chicks. We inserted a variety of ML "brains" into the artificial agents and measured whether those algorithms learned common object recognition behavior as chicks. All newborn chicks solved this one-shot object segmentation task, successfully learning background-invariant object representations that generalized across new backgrounds and viewpoints. In contrast, none of the artificial agents solved the task, instead learning background-dependent representations that failed to generalize across new backgrounds and viewpoints. This digital twin design exposes core limitations in current ML algorithms in developing brain-like object perception. Our NETT is publicly available for comparing ML algorithms with newborn chicks. We argue that NETT benchmarks can help researchers build embodied AI systems that learn as efficiently and robustly as newborn brains.