Probing the 3D Awareness of Visual Foundation Models
Authors: Mohamed El Banani, Amit Raj, Kevis-Kokitsi Maninis, Abhishek Kar, Yuanzhen Li, Michael Rubinstein, Deqing Sun, Leonidas Guibas, Justin Johnson, Varun Jampani

Recent advances in large-scale pretraining have yielded visual foundation models with strong capabilities. Not only can recent models generalize to arbitrary images for their training task their intermediate representations are useful for other visual tasks such as detection and segmentation. Given that such models can classify delineate and localize objects in 2D we ask whether they also represent their 3D structure? In this work we analyze the 3D awareness of visual foundation models. We posit that 3D awareness implies that representations (1) encode the 3D structure of the scene and (2) consistently represent the surface across views. We conduct a series of experiments using task-specific probes and zero-shot inference procedures on frozen features. Our experiments reveal several limitations of the current models. Our code and analysis can be found at https://github.com/mbanani/probe3d.