Native Association: Confidence-Aware Human Perception in the Wild with a Foundation VLM
Abstract: Extracting who is where, on which team, wearing which number from a broadcast frame is typically done by stitching a detector, an OCR engine, and classifiers together -- and the stitching step swaps identities under occlusion. We make association native instead: a 0.77B vision-language model (Florence-2) is fine-tuned to emit all per-person attributes as one grammar-constrained sequence, with each attribute generated inside its owner's block. Output is therefore schema-valid on every frame by construction, and no post-hoc binding step exists to attach a correctly read number to the wrong player: residual misassociation is pure perception error, $\approx4\times$ rarer than zero-shot-prompted frontier APIs' (0.057 vs. 0.21-0.24). On a frozen multi-sport test set, this single pass reaches 0.95 detection F1 (APIs: 0.65-0.75). A single extra forward pass yields a per-field confidence that supports a reject option (jersey precision $0.71\rightarrow0.96$ at half coverage) and routes a training-free zoom-and-re-read for small players. Surprisingly, once the grammar is learned, further parameter-efficient tuning yields no measurable gain under the adaptation configurations we test; the identical recipe on WIDER-Attribute reaches 93.1 mAP given-box, yields the first detection-coupled end-to-end results under its standard test protocol (84.5 mAP), and reproduces the same tuning result. In this regime, the gains live in the structure, not in added weights.