Accepted to ICLR 2026 — Revisiting Attentive Probing Through the Lens of Efficiency 🎉

We’re pleased to announce that our paper “Attention, Please! Revisiting Attentive Probing Through the Lens of Efficiency” has been accepted to ICLR 2026.

Authors: Bill Psomas, Dionysis Christopoulos, Eirini Baltzi, Ioannis Kakogeorgiou, Tilemachos Aravanis, Nikos Komodakis, Konstantinos Karantzalos, Yannis Avrithis, Giorgos Tolias.

Highlights:

• Introduces Efficient Probing (EP) — a lightweight, multi-query attentive probing method for frozen encoders.
• EP is compatible with all pre-training families; reduces computational cost, while preserving interpretability.
• Demonstrates consistent gains over k-NN and Linear Probing (LP) with minimal overhead.
• Unlocks the potential of encoders optimized for local representations.
• Complementary with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods.

Thanks to all co-authors and reviewers for their feedback.