PoseBench: Probing Pose Awareness in Visual Foundation Models

Most Nilufa Yeasmin, Draix Wyatt, Ruyi Lian

Pose awareness characterizes the extent to which a learned feature space aligns with the underlying object-pose manifold, such that observations with similar poses exhibit greater feature similarity than those with increasingly different poses. While such structure is desirable for pose-sensitive 3D vision tasks, visual foundation models pre-trained on individual 2D images typically lack explicit 3D or pose supervision. This raises a fundamental question: Do 2D visual foundation models exhibit pose awareness after large-scale pretraining? To answer this question, we introduce PoseBench, a systematic benchmark to probe pose awareness in pretrained visual features. Our evaluation follows a progressive design: held-out rendered views probe intrinsic pose-aware structure under controlled conditions, while real-image queries evaluate how robustly this structure remains accessible under real-world variations. We further introduce pose-graph-based refinement as a complementary probe of compatibility between feature neighborhoods and the underlying pose manifold. Across 31 publicly available checkpoints from 10 pretraining families, PoseBench reveals that pose awareness is an implicit…