The Perception–Physics Paradox: Probing Scientific Alignment with TC-Atlas

Abstract

While Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) excel at predictive tasks on satellite imagery, their performance can arise from visual correlations rather than underlying structural invariants, making certain perception-based out-of-distribution accuracy a poor proxy for scientific utility. As a result, models may look correct without reasoning correctly—a discrepancy we term the *Perception–Physics Paradox*. To address this gap, we introduce *Scientific Alignment* as an implicit objective for representation learning in scientific domains. We study a principled, testable aspect of scientific alignment through *Structural Isomorphism*, which requires latent representations to uniquely identify physical systems up to a linear reparameterization. This perspective induces a hierarchy of necessary conditions and yields a systematic probing protocol for physical and causal interpretability. To operationalize this framework, we release *TC-Atlas*, a foundational global dataset and automated construction pipeline for tropical cyclone research, and show that current VFMs rely on visual shortcuts that collapse in extreme regimes, indicating that scientific alignment does not arise as a natural byproduct of visual scaling alone.