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Main Authors: Singhal, Utkarsh, Feng, Ryan, Yu, Stella X., Prakash, Atul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10375
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author Singhal, Utkarsh
Feng, Ryan
Yu, Stella X.
Prakash, Atul
author_facet Singhal, Utkarsh
Feng, Ryan
Yu, Stella X.
Prakash, Atul
contents Perception in the real world requires robustness to diverse viewing conditions. Existing approaches often rely on specialized architectures or training with predefined data augmentations, limiting adaptability. Taking inspiration from mental rotation in human vision, we propose FOCAL, a test-time robustness framework that transforms the input into the most typical view. At inference time, FOCAL explores a set of transformed images and chooses the one with the highest likelihood under foundation model priors. This test-time optimization boosts robustness while requiring no retraining or architectural changes. Applied to models like CLIP and SAM, it significantly boosts robustness across a wide range of transformations, including 2D and 3D rotations, contrast and lighting shifts, and day-night changes. We also explore potential applications in active vision. By reframing invariance as a test-time optimization problem, FOCAL offers a general and scalable approach to robustness. Our code is available at: https://github.com/sutkarsh/focal.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10375
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Test-Time Canonicalization by Foundation Models for Robust Perception
Singhal, Utkarsh
Feng, Ryan
Yu, Stella X.
Prakash, Atul
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Perception in the real world requires robustness to diverse viewing conditions. Existing approaches often rely on specialized architectures or training with predefined data augmentations, limiting adaptability. Taking inspiration from mental rotation in human vision, we propose FOCAL, a test-time robustness framework that transforms the input into the most typical view. At inference time, FOCAL explores a set of transformed images and chooses the one with the highest likelihood under foundation model priors. This test-time optimization boosts robustness while requiring no retraining or architectural changes. Applied to models like CLIP and SAM, it significantly boosts robustness across a wide range of transformations, including 2D and 3D rotations, contrast and lighting shifts, and day-night changes. We also explore potential applications in active vision. By reframing invariance as a test-time optimization problem, FOCAL offers a general and scalable approach to robustness. Our code is available at: https://github.com/sutkarsh/focal.
title Test-Time Canonicalization by Foundation Models for Robust Perception
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10375