Token Bottleneck: One Token to Remember Dynamics
Authors: name: Taekyung Kim; name: Dongyoon Han; name: Byeongho Heo; name: Jeongeun Park; name: Sangdoo Yun
Published: 2025-07-09 04:57:29

Abstract: Deriving compact and temporally aware visual representations from dynamic
scenes is essential for successful execution of sequential scene understanding
tasks such as visual tracking and robotic manipulation. In this paper, we
introduce Token Bottleneck (ToBo), a simple yet intuitive self-supervised
learning pipeline that squeezes a scene into a bottleneck token and predicts
the subsequent scene using minimal patches as hints. The ToBo pipeline
facilitates the learning of sequential scene representations by conservatively
encoding the reference scene into a compact bottleneck token during the squeeze
step. In the expansion step, we guide the model to capture temporal dynamics by
predicting the target scene using the bottleneck token along with few target
patches as hints. This design encourages the vision backbone to embed temporal
dependencies, thereby enabling understanding of dynamic transitions across
scenes. Extensive experiments in diverse sequential tasks, including video
label propagation and robot manipulation in simulated environments demonstrate
the superiority of ToBo over baselines. Moreover, deploying our pre-trained
model on physical robots confirms its robustness and effectiveness in
real-world environments. We further validate the scalability of ToBo across
different model scales.