Birds of a Feather Flock Together: Background-Invariant Representations via Linear Structure in VLMs

ArXi:2605.11107v1 Announce Type: cross Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP and SigLIP 2, are widely used for image classification, yet their vision encoders remain vulnerable to systematic biases that undermine robustness. In particular, correlations between foreground objects and their backgrounds constitute a salient and practically important class of spurious dependencies. In this work, we revisit the well-known property of high linear additivity in VLM embedding spaces and show that it enables a decomposition of scene representations into foreground and background components.