Foveated Probes Recover Localized Binding Information in Vision Foundation Models
Frozen vision foundation models are commonly evaluated through a single global image embedding, but this interface can conflate missing information with information lost at readout time. We study this distinction by keeping a pretrained vision encoder frozen and varying only the readout applied to its final patch tokens. We compare standard global readouts against a lightweight foveated readout, which attention-pools patch tokens using a learned or question-conditioned query, and against an oracle readout with access to the annotated target region. We evaluate these interfaces on three localized binding problems: a controlled synthetic color--shape binding task under clutter, a color-free...
| Authors | Mateusz Michalkiewicz, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh, Guha Balakrishnan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 1 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 August 2026 |
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