{"paper":{"title":"Vertical Fusion: Condensing Internal Representations for Robust ViT Classification","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG","eess.IV"],"primary_cat":"cs.CV","authors_text":"Christian Ledig, Francesco Di Salvo, Hamed Damirchi, Ignacio Meza De la Jara, Marco Lents, Sebastian Doerrich, Shyam Nandan Rai","submitted_at":"2026-07-11T16:44:25Z","abstract_excerpt":"Despite exposing rich intermediate representations, Vision Transformers (ViTs) are almost exclusively utilized as black-box feature extractors, where only the last layer is considered for downstream tasks. We challenge this convention by introducing the notion of recoverability: the capacity of intermediate representations to correct last-layer failures. By evaluating independent classification probes at every model depth across 16 datasets, we observe that intermediate probes correctly classify 18% to 76% of samples that the last-layer probe misclassifies. We show that these gains are not pri"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2607.10391","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2607.10391/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}