Are All Tokens Necessary for Visual Place Recognition? An Empirical Study of Token Reduction for Efficient Inference

arXiv:2607.15563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent visual place recognition (VPR) methods based on vision transformers, particularly foundation models, have achieved remarkable recognition performance. However, these models process all visual tokens throughout the entire network, resulting in substantial computational overhead, which hinders their deployment in real-time and resource-constrained scenarios. A natural question thus arises: are all visual tokens necessary for VPR? To answer thi...