Despite the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their success across numerous computer vision applications, the fundamental understanding of their dimensional and representational geometry remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Transformer Geometry Observatory (TGO), a systematic framework of experiments and analysis pipelines designed to investigate the representational geometry and dynamics of Vision Transformers.
arXiv:2607. 02386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Vision Transformers have achieved remarkable success across computer vision and language applications, the geometric evolution of their internal representations throughout training remains insufficiently understood.
By Kaustubh Kapil, Kishor P. Upla
arXiv:2505. 15441v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Natural images exhibit strong geometric regularities: local structures, such as edges, corners, and textures, appear in many orientations and mirror configurations.
By David Nordstr\"om, Johan Edstedt, Fredrik Kahl, Georg B\"okman
arXiv:2609.27988v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Methods operating on Vision Transformer (ViT) feature spaces typically rely on Euclidean distance or cosine similarity. This assumes that every direc...
By Andrew Bond, Ege Erdem \"Ozl\"u, Tuna \c{C}imen, Ilkin Umut Melanlioglu, Tolga Birdal, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem
Methods operating on Vision Transformer (ViT) feature spaces typically rely on Euclidean distance or cosine similarity. This assumes that every direction is equally meaningful, but there is no reason...
arXiv:2608. 20134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a novel view on feature evolution in Vision Transformers (ViTs) by visualizing the training process over two dimensions -- network depth (layer) and training time (epochs).
By Joonas J\"arve, Halil Ibrahim Aysel, Tarun Khajuria, Meelis Kull
arXiv:2610.00848v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have emerged as powerful candidates for universal vision backbones, with representative architectures including autoreg...
By Shao-Jun Xia, Huixin Zhang, Zhen Lei, Anlan Sun, Yuner Zhang, Xiaoyang Chen
arXiv:2506.08641v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Adapting vision models for time series analysis is compelling, yet all existing approaches are falling short of dedicated time series foundation mo...
By Simon Roschmann, Quentin Bouniot, Vasilii Feofanov, Ievgen Redko, Zeynep Akata
The paper investigates how knowledge distillation from Vision Transformers to smaller CNNs can cause dimensional collapse in the student’s representation space. Using SVD and Shannon entropy, the authors show that cosine‑based distillation leads to a drastic reduction in effective rank, while adding an InfoNCE objective can double the rank but harms downstream accuracy due to signal dilution. They further demonstrate that a label‑aware contrastive objective (Supervised Contrastive distillation) can maintain or improve accuracy without unnecessary rank expansion, indicating that effective rank alone is not a reliable indicator of representation quality.
By Kabir Thayani
Cut‑ViT introduces a task‑specific pruning pipeline for visual foundation models that uses gram anchoring matrices and subspace decomposition to align feature representations between native and pruned DINOv3 models. The method incorporates basis‑agnostic and residual constraints to preserve robustness across spatial and channel dimensions, and employs spectral entropy adaptation to tailor the pruning objective to downstream tasks. Experiments demonstrate that Cut‑ViT achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on six tasks across nine datasets while reducing pruning time to about one minute on a single A100 GPU, using only 20.9% of the time and 45.5% of the GPU memory compared to prior methods.
By Jianjian Yin, Liulei Li, Tao Chen, Yi Chen, Yazhou Yao, Wenguan Wang
arXiv:2607. 14018v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate how each component of the Transformer feedforward block architecture design determines how much rank survives across depth at initialization.
By Katie Everett
arXiv:2606. 00124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Positional embeddings (PEs) in Vision Transformers (ViTs) are known to impact performance and robustness, but their role in shaping internal spatial representations is not well understood.
By Mahmoud Mannes