representation-centric

Definition

Organising the work around what the internal representation should be, rather than around a task or an output format. The position it stakes out is that choices like image-plane versus bird's-eye-view, or discrete tokens versus continuous vectors, determine downstream capability and extensibility more than any particular head or loss does. Read it as a methodological stance being announced, in contrast to task-centric framing where the goal is a number on a benchmark.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Explained: Beyond Data Scaling — Why the Backbone, Not the Trajectory Count, Decides Your VLA (VLAct)Beyond Data Scaling: Representation-Centric Continued Pre-training for Vision-Language-Action Models