Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mahatha, Kunal, Bahri, Ali, Marza, Pierre, Dastani, Sahar, Vakalopoulou, Maria, Christodoulidis, Stergios, Dolz, Jose, Desrosiers, Christian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00904
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914298905755648
author Mahatha, Kunal
Bahri, Ali
Marza, Pierre
Dastani, Sahar
Vakalopoulou, Maria
Christodoulidis, Stergios
Dolz, Jose
Desrosiers, Christian
author_facet Mahatha, Kunal
Bahri, Ali
Marza, Pierre
Dastani, Sahar
Vakalopoulou, Maria
Christodoulidis, Stergios
Dolz, Jose
Desrosiers, Christian
contents State space models (SSMs) have recently emerged as an alternative to transformers due to their unique ability of modeling global relationships in text with linear complexity. However, their success in vision tasks has been limited due to their causal formulation, which is suitable for sequential text but detrimental in the spatial domain where causality breaks the inherent spatial relationships among pixels or patches. As a result, standard SSMs fail to capture local spatial coherence, often linking non-adjacent patches while ignoring neighboring ones that are visually correlated. To address these limitations, we introduce OCTOPUS , a novel architecture that preserves both global context and local spatial structure within images, while maintaining the linear complexity of SSMs. OCTOPUS performs discrete reoccurrence along eight principal orientations, going forward or backward in the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal directions, allowing effective information exchange across all spatially connected regions while maintaining independence among unrelated patches. This design enables multi-directional recurrence, capturing both global context and local spatial structure with SSM-level efficiency. In our classification and segmentation benchmarks, OCTOPUS demonstrates notable improvements in boundary preservation and region consistency, as evident from the segmentation results, while maintaining relatively better classification accuracy compared to existing V-SSM based models. These results suggest that OCTOPUS appears as a foundation method for multi-directional recurrence as a scalable and effective mechanism for building spatially aware and computationally efficient vision architectures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_00904
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OCTOPUS: Enhancing the Spatial-Awareness of Vision SSMs with Multi-Dimensional Scans and Traversal Selection
Mahatha, Kunal
Bahri, Ali
Marza, Pierre
Dastani, Sahar
Vakalopoulou, Maria
Christodoulidis, Stergios
Dolz, Jose
Desrosiers, Christian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
State space models (SSMs) have recently emerged as an alternative to transformers due to their unique ability of modeling global relationships in text with linear complexity. However, their success in vision tasks has been limited due to their causal formulation, which is suitable for sequential text but detrimental in the spatial domain where causality breaks the inherent spatial relationships among pixels or patches. As a result, standard SSMs fail to capture local spatial coherence, often linking non-adjacent patches while ignoring neighboring ones that are visually correlated. To address these limitations, we introduce OCTOPUS , a novel architecture that preserves both global context and local spatial structure within images, while maintaining the linear complexity of SSMs. OCTOPUS performs discrete reoccurrence along eight principal orientations, going forward or backward in the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal directions, allowing effective information exchange across all spatially connected regions while maintaining independence among unrelated patches. This design enables multi-directional recurrence, capturing both global context and local spatial structure with SSM-level efficiency. In our classification and segmentation benchmarks, OCTOPUS demonstrates notable improvements in boundary preservation and region consistency, as evident from the segmentation results, while maintaining relatively better classification accuracy compared to existing V-SSM based models. These results suggest that OCTOPUS appears as a foundation method for multi-directional recurrence as a scalable and effective mechanism for building spatially aware and computationally efficient vision architectures.
title OCTOPUS: Enhancing the Spatial-Awareness of Vision SSMs with Multi-Dimensional Scans and Traversal Selection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00904