Learning Sparse Visual Representations via Spatial-Semantic Factorization

Theodore Zhengde Zhao; Sid Kiblawi; Jianwei Yang; Naoto Usuyama; Reuben Tan; Noel C Codella; Tristan Naumann; Hoifung Poon; Mu Wei

arXiv · 2602.01905

Learning Sparse Visual Representations via Spatial-Semantic Factorization

Theodore Zhengde Zhao·Sid Kiblawi·Jianwei Yang·Naoto Usuyama·Reuben Tan·Noel C Codella·Tristan Naumann·Hoifung Poon·Mu Wei

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Abstract

Self-supervised learning (SSL) faces a fundamental conflict between semantic understanding and image reconstruction. High-level semantic SSL (e.g., DINO) relies on global tokens that are forced to be location-invariant for augmentation alignment, a process that inherently discards the spatial coordinates required for reconstruction. Conversely, generative SSL (e.g., MAE) preserves dense feature grids for reconstruction but fails to produce high-level abstractions. We introduce STELLAR, a framework that resolves this tension by factorizing visual features into a low-rank product of semantic concepts and their spatial distributions. This disentanglement allows us to perform DINO-style augmentation alignment on the semantic tokens while maintaining the precise spatial mapping in the localization matrix necessary for pixel-level reconstruction. We demonstrate that as few as 16 sparse tokens under this factorized form are sufficient to simultaneously support high-quality reconstruction (2.60 FID) and match the semantic performance of dense backbones (79.10% ImageNet accuracy). Our results highlight STELLAR as a versatile sparse representation that bridges the gap between discriminative and generative vision by strategically separating semantic identity from spatial geometry. Code available at https://aka.ms/stellar.

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Theodore Zhengde Zhao, Sid Kiblawi, Jianwei Yang, Naoto Usuyama, Reuben Tan, Noel C Codella, Tristan Naumann, Hoifung Poon, Mu Wei. 2026-02-02. Learning Sparse Visual Representations via Spatial-Semantic Factorization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01905

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