Look Up and Look Back: Hidden Attention and Latent Orientation in a Frozen Foundation Model for Panoramic SLAM

Monocular panoramic SLAM benefits from substantial visual overlap under large camera rotations, yet remains prone to errors caused by camera tilt, scale drift, and false loop closures. We show that a frozen panoramic geometry foundation model provides useful internal cues beyond its explicit geometric outputs: intermediate tokens encode gravity in the camera frame, while cross-view attention provides a compatibility cue for potential revisits. Building on these cues, we present HALO-SLAM. A gravity readout enables IMU-free spherical upright canonicalization. For loop closure, we introduce a cost-aware three-stage cascade combining DBoW2 event-level retrieval, attention-based compatibility filtering, and dense geometric validation through symmetric submap augmentation. Accepted revisits yield pixel-aligned 3D--3D correspondences in both local gauges, from which robust Sim(3) constraints are estimated and jointly optimized with sequential constraints in a global pose graph. Across 125 sequences from five real-world panoramic benchmarks, our method achieves 100% sequence success (125/125) under the stated criterion and the lowest ATE among the evaluated methods on all five benchmarks, reducing ATE by 30--88% relative to the best ERP-native baseline on each benchmark.