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:2606. 19249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.
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.
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: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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
arXiv:2601. 09173v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Representational similarity analysis and related methods compare the internal geometries of neural networks, but they measure only alignment between spaces, leaving a blind spot -- whether a representation's structure is reliably recoverable, not merely similar.