Canonical Color as a Lens into Concept Decodability in Vision Encoders and VLMs

Abstract:Visual encoders construct a representation of the image input for Vision-Language models. How much conceptual, as opposed to immediately visible, information does this representation contain? We use canonical color as a controlled test case to ask whether vision encoders make canonical-color information linearly accessible, even when color is removed from the input image. We construct a dataset of objects with canonical colors, and probe vision encoders for both color and object identity using color and grayscale images. We find that canonical color remains decodable from grayscale images, and is tied to predicted object identity, indicating a conceptual link. Extending this analysis to full VLMs, we find that VLM post-training can have a surprisingly large effect on color decodability in the vision encoder. Overall, canonical color provides a usefully controllable lens for tracing object-level conceptual semantic information in vision encoders and VLMs.

12 pages, 7 figures. Accepted to EMNLP 2026

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.09124 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.09124v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.09124 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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