Emergent Object Binding Has a Finite Spatial Horizon

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.00006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained Vision Transformers encode whether two image patches belong to the same object. This IsSameObject signal is decodable from frozen patch embeddings at high accuracy, which suggests that object binding emerges from self-supervised pretraining alone. We show that this single accuracy number hides the structure of the signal. Binding is local: the probability that two patches of the same object are decoded as bound falls off monotonically