TriLite: Efficient Weakly Supervised Object Localization with Universal Visual Features and Tri-Region Disentanglement

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to localize target objects in images using only image-level labels. Despite recent progress, many approaches still rely on multi-stage pipelines or full fine-tuning of large backbones, which increases training cost, while the broader WSOL community continues to face the challenge of partial object coverage. We present TriLite, a single-stage WSOL framework that leverages a frozen Vision Transformer with DINOv2 pre-training in a self-supervised manner, and introduces only a minimal number of trainable parameters (fewer than 800K on ImageNet-1K) for both classification and localization. At its core is the proposed Tri-Head module, which decomposes patch features into foreground, background, and ambiguous regions, thereby improving object coverage while suppressing spurious activations. By disentangling classification and localization objectives, TriLite effectively exploits the universal representations learned by self-supervised ViTs without requiring expensive end-to-end training. Extensive experiments on CUB-200-2011, ImageNet-1K, and OpenImages demonstrate that TriLite sets a new state of the art, while remaining significantly more parameter-efficient and easier to train than prior methods. Code is available at https: //github.com/ariansabaghi/TriLite.