Patch-Level DINOv2 Scoring for Gravitational-Wave Glitch Detection: Breaking the Signal Dilution Barrier via Vector-Quantized Local Feature Indexing

Abstract

We present a patch-level scoring architecture for unsupervised gravitational-wave glitch detection that mitigates the signal dilution limitation identified in Cirfeta (2026b). The CLS token of frozen DINOv2 (ViT-S/14) performs global average pooling over 37x37=1369 patches, systematically suppressing signals occupying less than 5% of the spectrogram grid. We replace the global CLS similarity metric with a top-$k$ order statistic over individual patch token similarities against a Vector-Quantized reference index ($K=64$ centroids per class, 19 Gravity Spy O3b morphologies, 1216 total centroids). Applied to strain-domain injections in LIGO O4a L1 data (session 20260524), we demonstrate a statistically significant distributional separation ($\text{KS}=0.963$ at optimal $k=68$) for spatially extended morphologies (SpiralBurst), while confirming the patch-size temporal resolution limit for ultra-short transients (AsymBlip). A topological saliency map constructed from spatial patch similarity against a background matrix (78 null segments) correctly localizes glitch signatures for Scattered_Light and injected SpiralBurst. The Max/Mean ratio analysis demonstrates that patch-level saliency functions as a topological visualizer rather than a binary detector, consistent with the non-isotropic geometry of DINOv2 embedding space on GW spectrograms.