Study: Probe evaluation of spatial state representations in visual foundation models

The study uses frozen-feature probes to examine ten visual foundation model representations across four levels—spatial structure, object persistence, predictive spatial update, and actionability—under streaming first-person observations of static indoor environments. Results show that strong readout of the visible scene does not guarantee accurate object persistence or future-feature retrieval, and a spatial reader trained on real features does not transfer unchanged to predicted features. Object persistence and actionability depend on camera pose readout, while feature prediction depends on visible-scene readout.