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arXiv · 2610.41814

A Patch is More Than a Token

Zixiong Wang·Haiping Ma
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Abstract

Vision Transformers represent each image patch through a canonical token produced under one observation condition. That token is a powerful interface, but it is still one realized state of the patch. We introduce PMTT, which establishes two foundations: a patch representation object can extend from one canonical state to a canonical-centered Representation State Family, and identity-preserving variation opens Patch-Level Local Feature Space. We develop four parts of this representation program. Patch Information Acquisition and Dense Orbital Views expose lawful same-patch states. Visible-to-Hidden prediction tests whether observed states reveal structure beyond themselves. Intrinsic analysis identifies low-dimensional, energy-concentrated, patch-specific, predictive geometry. Representation Organization separates acquiring more information from organizing that information, with an analytic Manifold as the central structured representation. We realize PMTT on frozen DINOv3 S/B/L/H+ backbones without neural post-training of the representation. Across two independent 4,096-anchor cohorts, Manifold explains 70.8-79.6% of Hidden variation, compared with 55.0-72.3% for directly Observed states, and wins on more than 95% of anchors at every scale. Effective rank falls from about 2.5 to 2.0 while dominant energy concentration rises with backbone scale. Across six visual capabilities and four scales, Observed exceeds the canonical Center in 21 of 24 conditions, Manifold exceeds Center in 23, and Manifold exceeds Observed in 16. The strongest current consequence appears in physical correspondence, where MegaDepth satisfies Center < Observed < Manifold at every scale. These results show that pretrained visual backbones contain richer patch information than the standard single-token interface directly exposes. Code and experimental assets are available at https://github.com/zixiongwang-ai/PMTT.

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Zixiong Wang, Haiping Ma. 2026-10-30. A Patch is More Than a Token. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41814

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