English

Falcon Perception

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-31 v1

Abstract

Perception-centric systems are typically implemented with a modular encoder-decoder pipeline: a vision backbone for feature extraction and a separate decoder (or late-fusion module) for task prediction. This raises a central question: is this architectural separation essential or can a single early-fusion stack do both perception and task modeling at scale? We introduce Falcon Perception, a unified dense Transformer that processes image patches and text tokens in a shared parameter space from the first layer, using a hybrid attention pattern (bidirectional among image tokens, causal for prediction tokens) to combine global visual context with autoregressive, variable-length instance generation. To keep dense outputs practical, Falcon Perception retains a lightweight token interface and decodes continuous spatial outputs with specialized heads, enabling parallel high-resolution mask prediction. Our design promotes simplicity: we keep a single scalable backbone and shift complexity toward data and training signals, adding only small heads where outputs are continuous and dense. On SA-Co, Falcon Perception improves mask quality to 68.0 Macro-F1_1 compared to 62.3 of SAM3. We also introduce PBench, a benchmark targeting compositional prompts (OCR, spatial constraints, relations) and dense long-context regimes, where the model shows better gains. Finally, we extend the same early-fusion recipe to Falcon OCR: a compact 300M-parameter model which attains 80.3% on olmOCR and 88.64 on OmniDocBench.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.27365,
  title  = {Falcon Perception},
  author = {Aviraj Bevli and Sofian Chaybouti and Yasser Dahou and Hakim Hacid and Ngoc Dung Huynh and Phuc H. Le Khac and Sanath Narayan and Wamiq Reyaz Para and Ankit Singh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.27365},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:42:26.044Z