Seeing Is Not Addressing: Auditing Linguistic Access to Frozen Visual Geometry
Visual distinctions are often finer than those reflected in linguistic conceptualization. Vision-language models exhibit a similar asymmetry: a distinction can remain discriminable in frozen image geometry while being weakly addressable through the native text interface. We study this gap by separating visual discriminability from linguistic addressability in text-to-image retrieval. Using FactorAtlas, a fully crossed testbed of 23,040 images spanning shape, hue, pattern, and nuisance variation, we compare both readouts on held-out images of the same distinctions. We then derive image-side contrasts that separate each value from its alternatives for matched visual grounding, and test whet...
| Authors | Woosang Jeon, Jiwon Yang, Soo Chung et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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