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Main Authors: Ponbagavathi, Thinesh Thiyakesan, Peng, Kunyu, Roitberg, Alina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16207
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author Ponbagavathi, Thinesh Thiyakesan
Peng, Kunyu
Roitberg, Alina
author_facet Ponbagavathi, Thinesh Thiyakesan
Peng, Kunyu
Roitberg, Alina
contents Changes of camera perspective are a common obstacle in driver monitoring. While deep learning and pretrained foundation models show strong potential for improved generalization via lightweight adaptation of the final layers ('probing'), their robustness to unseen viewpoints remains underexplored. We study this challenge by adapting image foundation models to driver monitoring using a single training view, and evaluating them directly on unseen perspectives without further adaptation. We benchmark simple linear probes, advanced probing strategies, and compare two foundation models (DINOv2 and CLIP) against parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and full fine-tuning. Building on these insights, we introduce T-MASK -- a new image-to-video probing method that leverages temporal token masking and emphasizes more dynamic video regions. Benchmarked on the public Drive&Act dataset, T-MASK improves cross-view top-1 accuracy by $+1.23\%$ over strong probing baselines and $+8.0\%$ over PEFT methods, without adding any parameters. It proves particularly effective for underrepresented secondary activities, boosting recognition by $+5.42\%$ under the trained view and $+1.36\%$ under cross-view settings. This work provides encouraging evidence that adapting foundation models with lightweight probing methods like T-MASK has strong potential in fine-grained driver observation, especially in cross-view and low-data settings. These results highlight the importance of temporal token selection when leveraging foundation models to build robust driver monitoring systems. Code and models will be made available at https://github.com/th-nesh/T-MASK to support ongoing research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16207
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle T-MASK: Temporal Masking for Probing Foundation Models across Camera Views in Driver Monitoring
Ponbagavathi, Thinesh Thiyakesan
Peng, Kunyu
Roitberg, Alina
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Changes of camera perspective are a common obstacle in driver monitoring. While deep learning and pretrained foundation models show strong potential for improved generalization via lightweight adaptation of the final layers ('probing'), their robustness to unseen viewpoints remains underexplored. We study this challenge by adapting image foundation models to driver monitoring using a single training view, and evaluating them directly on unseen perspectives without further adaptation. We benchmark simple linear probes, advanced probing strategies, and compare two foundation models (DINOv2 and CLIP) against parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and full fine-tuning. Building on these insights, we introduce T-MASK -- a new image-to-video probing method that leverages temporal token masking and emphasizes more dynamic video regions. Benchmarked on the public Drive&Act dataset, T-MASK improves cross-view top-1 accuracy by $+1.23\%$ over strong probing baselines and $+8.0\%$ over PEFT methods, without adding any parameters. It proves particularly effective for underrepresented secondary activities, boosting recognition by $+5.42\%$ under the trained view and $+1.36\%$ under cross-view settings. This work provides encouraging evidence that adapting foundation models with lightweight probing methods like T-MASK has strong potential in fine-grained driver observation, especially in cross-view and low-data settings. These results highlight the importance of temporal token selection when leveraging foundation models to build robust driver monitoring systems. Code and models will be made available at https://github.com/th-nesh/T-MASK to support ongoing research.
title T-MASK: Temporal Masking for Probing Foundation Models across Camera Views in Driver Monitoring
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16207