CanViT: Toward Active-Vision Foundation Models
Organizations: McGill University · Mila - Quebec AI Institute · Université Laval
Abstract
Active computer vision promises efficient, biologically plausible perception through sequential, localized glimpses, but lacks scalable general-purpose architectures and pretraining pipelines, leaving Active-Vision Foundation Models (AVFMs) underexplored. We introduce CanViT, the first task- and policy-agnostic AVFM. CanViT uses scene-relative RoPE to bind a retinotopic Vision Transformer backbone and a spatiotopic scene-wide latent workspace, the canvas. Efficient interaction with this high-capacity working memory is supported by Canvas Attention, a novel asymmetric cross-attention mechanism. We decouple thinking (backbone-level) and memory (canvas-level), eliminating canvas-side self-attention and fully-connected layers to achieve fast sequential inference and scalability to high output resolutions. We propose a label-free active vision pretraining scheme, policy-agnostic passive-to-active dense latent distillation: reconstructing scene-wide DINOv3 embeddings from sequences of low-resolution glimpses with randomized locations, zoom levels, and lengths. We pretrain CanViT-B from a random initialization on 13.2 million ImageNet-21k scenes--an order of magnitude more than previous active models--and 1 billion random glimpses, in 166 hours on a single H100. On ADE20K segmentation, a frozen CanViT-B achieves 38.5% mIoU in a single low-resolution glimpse, outperforming the best active model's 27.6% with 20x fewer inference FLOPs as well as its FLOP- or input-matched DINOv3 teacher. Given additional glimpses, CanViT-B reaches 45.9% ADE20K mIoU. On ImageNet-1k classification, CanViT-B also sets a new active-vision state of the art, with 84.5% top-1 accuracy after fine-tuning. CanViT generalizes to longer rollouts, larger scenes, and new policies. Our work narrows the wide gap between passive and active computer vision, demonstrating the potential of task- and policy-agnostic AVFM pretraining.
Figures & tables
| Model | ADE20K mIoU | IN1k top-1 |
| Saccader 15 | — | 75.0 |
| AME 42 (MAE) | 24.4 | — |
| AME 42 (SETR) | 27.6 | — |
| AdaGlimpse 43 | 25.7 | 77.5 |
| AdaptiveNN 62 | — | 82.2 |
| CanViT-B | 45.9 † | 81.1 † / 84.5 |
Appendix figures & tables17 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Hyperparameter | Value |
| Backbone | ViT-B/16 |
| Backbone embedding dim | 768 |
| Backbone registers (ephemeral) | 5 |
| Glimpse patch size | px |
| Canvas embedding dim | 1024 |
| Canvas registers (persistent) | 16 |
| Hyperparameter | Value |
| Optimizer | AdamW |
| Initial learning rate | |
| Peak learning rate | |
| LR schedule | Warmup Const. |
| LR warmup steps | 100,000 |
| Weight decay |
| Policy | Canvas | ||||||||
| EG-C2F † | 38.5 | 41.1 | 42.0 | 42.7 | 43.2 | 43.9 | 44.2 | 44.1 | |
| EG-C2F † | 39.6 | 42.2 | 43.3 | 44.1 | 44.7 | 45.6 | 45.8 | 45.7 | |
| C2F | 38.5 | 40.3 | 41.4 | 42.3 | 43.2 | 43.6 | 44.0 | 44.2 | |
| C2F | 39.6 | 41.3 | 42.5 | 43.6 | 44.7 | 45.1 | 45.6 | 45.9 | |
| F-IID | 38.5 | 40.0 | 40.8 | 41.3 | 41.7 | 42.7 | 43.2 | 43.3 | |
| F-IID | 39.6 | 41.2 | 42.0 | 42.5 | 43.0 | 44.1 | 44.7 | 44.9 |
| Policy | ||||
| EG-C2F † | 31.6 | 39.3 | 44.2 | 45.8 |
| C2F | 31.6 | 39.1 | 44.2 | 45.9 |
| F-IID | 30.7 | 38.1 | 43.3 | 44.9 |
| R-IID | 29.5 | 37.2 | 41.6 | 43.1 |
| RFS † | 30.3 | 36.8 | 40.0 | 41.1 |
| F2C | 29.2 | 36.8 | 41.2 | 42.9 |
| Policy | |||||||||
| C2F | 76.79 | 78.62 | 79.58 | 80.25 | 80.77 | 80.85 | 81.02 | 81.12 | 81.13 |
| F-IID | 76.79 | 78.50 | 79.32 | 79.81 | 80.13 | 80.37 | 80.86 | 81.09 | 81.14 |
| R-IID | 47.73 | 65.23 | 72.23 | 75.50 | 77.24 | 78.22 | 79.71 | 80.37 | 80.56 |
| RFS † | 76.79 | 77.85 | 77.99 | 78.01 | 78.01 | 77.99 | 77.73 | 77.40 | 77.16 |
| F2C | 32.22 | 49.04 | 58.57 | 64.40 | 68.23 | 70.81 | 75.93 | 78.52 | 79.78 |
| Policy | ||||
| C2F | 80.61 | 81.08 | 81.14 | 81.16 |
| F-IID | 80.74 | 81.06 | 81.14 | 81.14 |
| R-IID | 80.25 | 80.52 | 80.56 | 80.58 |
| RFS † | 77.78 | 77.99 | 78.01 | 78.02 |
| F2C | 79.37 | 79.69 | 79.78 | 79.80 |
| Policy | |||||||||
| C2F | 80.59 | 82.25 | 83.21 | 83.90 | 84.35 | 84.43 | 84.51 | 84.53 | 84.51 |
| F-IID | 80.59 | 82.24 | 82.95 | 83.40 | 83.70 | 83.89 | 84.25 | 84.42 | 84.43 |
| R-IID | 50.99 | 68.90 | 75.90 | 79.07 | 80.66 | 81.56 | 82.97 | 83.50 | 83.67 |
| RFS † | 80.59 | 81.59 | 81.81 | 81.76 | 81.62 | 81.53 | 81.21 | 80.69 | 80.43 |
| F2C | 35.77 | 53.47 | 63.01 | 68.78 | 72.47 | 74.91 | 79.38 | 81.40 | 82.38 |
| Model | Input | Scene grid | GFLOPs | mIoU (%) |
| DINOv3 ViT-S/16 | 128 px | 3.1 | 25.2 | |
| DINOv3 ViT-S/16 | 144 px | 3.8 | 27.1 | |
| DINOv3 ViT-S/16 | 160 px | 4.7 | 29.4 | |
| DINOv3 ViT-S/16 | 192 px | 6.8 | 32.3 | |
| DINOv3 ViT-S/16 | 256 px | 12.5 | 36.9 | |
| DINOv3 ViT-S/16 | 384 px | 31.2 | 40.9 |
| Model | IN-ReAL top-1 (official / ours) | IN1k top-1 (ours) |
| ViT-S/16 | 87.0% / 87.08% | 81.40% |
| ViT-S+/16 | 88.0% / 88.08% | 82.89% |
| ViT-B/16 | 89.3% / 89.54% | 85.00% |
| ViT-L/16 | 90.2% / 90.42% | 87.44% |
| ViT-H+/16 | 90.3% / 90.31% | 87.65% |
| Model | Loss | Batch size | Peak LR | Weight decay | DINOv3 init | Epochs (aug., total) | |
| ViT-S/16 | softmax | 2048 | Yes | 10, 20 | |||
| ViT-S+/16 | softmax | 1024 | No | 10, 20 | |||
| ViT-B/16 | softmax | 1024 | Yes | 10, 20 | |||
| ViT-L/16 | sigmoid | 2048 | Yes | 10, 20 | |||
| ViT-H+/16 | sigmoid | 1024 | No | 8, 16 |
| Variant | Params | GFLOPs | Sp. Cos | CLS Cos |
| CanViT-B (baseline) | 95.2M | 15.8 | ref | ref |
| a , asymmetric ( ) | 88.1M | 13.2 | 12.0% | 2.2% |
| b , + QKVO ( ) | 88.8M | 14.8 | 11.7% | 1.5% |
| c , + QKVO ( ) | 91.0M | 17.3 | 5.8% | 1.1% |
| d No canvas reads | 90.4M | 14.2 | 6.6% | 8.0% |
| e RW stride (1R / 1W) | 88.8M | 13.7 | 4.0% | 6.0% |
| Variant | ||||
| Sp. | CLS | Sp. | CLS | |
| CanViT-B (baseline) | 46.9–47.3 | 46.3–46.9 | 71.3–71.4 | 69.6–69.6 |
| a , asymmetric | 42.6–43.1 | 45.7–46.5 | 62.7–62.8 | 68.0–68.1 |
| b , + QKVO | 42.6–43.2 | 45.9–46.7 | 63.0–63.0 | 68.5–68.6 |
| c , + QKVO | 44.7–45.0 | 45.9–46.4 | 67.1–67.2 | 68.8–68.9 |
| d No canvas reads | 45.3–45.7 | 44.2–44.8 | 66.6–66.7 | 64.0–64.1 |
| Device | Scene grid | CanViT-B | DINOv3 ViT-B/16 | DINOv3 ViT-S/16 | |||
| ms | MB | ms | MB | ms | MB | ||
| CPU, 1T | 143 | — | 121 | — | 34.8 | — | |
| CPU, 1T | 154 | — | 407 | — | 115 | — | |
| CPU, 1T | 224 | — | 1975 | — | 663 | — | |
| CPU, 1T | 486 | — | 13049 | — | 4882 | — | |
| CPU, 16T | 29.3 | — | 27.4 | — | 10.1 | — | |