# TAPe+ML: A Compact Structured Representation for Multi-Task Computer Vision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20869/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present TAPe+ML v3, a compact computer vision system based on TAPe (Theory of Active Perception), a structured representation that encodes relations among perceptual elements before recognition. Instead of operating directly on pixel tensors, the system uses a shared TAPe representation and a modular recognition architecture for image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. TAPe+ML v3 combines background and contour processing, local object localization, prototype-based classification, and a coordinator for specialized submodels. Across the reported experiments, it uses fewer than 100,000 parameters. On COCO object detection, it obtains 84.7 mAP50 and 65.3 mAP50-95. On COCO instance segmentation, it obtains 80.7 mask mAP50 and 58.4 mask mAP50-95. In classification experiments, it reaches 92 percent validation accuracy on Imagenette under an identical-training comparison with a raw-pixel baseline, and 89.9 percent Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-Real. We also evaluate compactness in video scene detection and adaptation under distribution shift in an industrial pilot. The results suggest that shifting part of the modeling burden from network parameters to a structured input representation can support compact multi-task vision systems with reduced data, memory, and compute requirements.