{"id":480,"date":"2025-10-25T05:49:38","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T05:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/10\/25\/visual-features-across-modalities-svg-and-ascii-art-reveal-cross-modal-understanding\/"},"modified":"2025-11-16T14:45:31","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T14:45:31","slug":"visual-features-across-modalities-svg-and-ascii-art-reveal-cross-modal-understanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/10\/25\/visual-features-across-modalities-svg-and-ascii-art-reveal-cross-modal-understanding\/","title":{"rendered":"Visual Features Across Modalities: SVG and ASCII Art Reveal Cross-Modal Understanding"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>We found that the same feature that activates over the eyes in an ASCII face also activates for eyes across diverse text-based modalities, including SVG code and prose in various languages. This is not limited to eyes \u2013 we found a number of cross-modal features that recognize specific concepts: from small components like mouths and ears within ASCII or SVG faces, to full visual depictions like dogs and cats. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>These features depend on the surrounding context within the visual depiction. For instance, an SVG circle element activates \u201ceye\u201d features only when positioned within a larger structure that activates \u201cface\u201d features.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/simonwillison.net\/2025\/Oct\/25\/visual-features-across-modalities\/\">simonwillison.net\/2025\/Oct\/25\/visual-features-across-modalities\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We found that the same feature that activates over the eyes in an ASCII face also activates for eyes across diverse text-based modalities, including SVG code and prose in various languages. This is not limited to eyes \u2013 we found a number of cross-modal features that recognize specific concepts: from small components like mouths and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,28,7,19,32],"class_list":["post-480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-ai","tag-categories","tag-consciousness","tag-knowledge","tag-senses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":515,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions\/515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}