Beyond Compression: Quantifying Spectral Accessibility in Vision Representations

Vision-language models map visual features into a shared embedding space through learned projection layers, yet it remains unclear how these transformations alter the structure of visual information. This study examines changes in representation through spatial-frequency accessibility, measured by the linear recoverability of band-limited Fourier energy from model representations. To isolate effects beyond dimensionality reduction, we introduce Residual Spectral Loss (RSL), which evaluates changes relative to a dimension-matched random projection baseline. To reduce confounding effects from optimization, the analysis uses pretrained models with all parameters frozen. The experimental results show consistent frequency-dependent changes in accessibility across CLIP and DINOv2 on ImageNet and MS-COCO datasets. Spectral accessibility follows a non-monotonic trajectory across depth, peaking at intermediate layers before decreasing toward the output representation. The final transformation differs across architectures: CLIP's learned projection is spectrally neutral, with changes explained by compression, whereas DINOv2's [CLS] pooling induces a structured loss across the spectrum. These findings identify intermediate layers and pooling mechanisms as primary drivers of spectral transformation in modern vision encoders.