arXiv Computer Vision

CODI: Improving Self-Supervised Vision Transformers with Cross Distillation

The paper introduces CODI, a method that enhances self‑supervised Vision Transformers by mixing a small portion of the teacher’s class‑token distribution into each teacher patch‑token target. This cross distillation approach gives every masked patch an attention‑independent semantic correction without altering the architecture. Experiments demonstrate that CODI improves performance on both dense prediction and image‑level tasks under aligned pretraining settings.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 11

Grid-Preserving Knowledge Distillation: Transferring Convolutional Inductive Bias to Vision Transformers under Data Scarcity

Vision Transformers underperform convolutional networks when training data is scarce, and distilling convolutional inductive biases from a CNN teacher is an effective remedy that leaves the deployed model unchanged. General-purpose feature distillation, however, transfers little in this setting.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 16

V-GIFT: Boosting Visual Instruction Tuning with Self-Supervised Guidance

The paper introduces V‑GIFT, a lightweight method that enhances visual instruction tuning for multimodal large language models by incorporating a small set of visually grounded self‑supervised tasks expressed as natural language instructions. These tasks—such as rotation prediction, color matching, and cross‑view correspondence—are reformulated into image‑instruction‑response triplets, providing supervision that cannot be solved without visual evidence. The approach requires no human annotations, architectural changes, or extra training stages, and consistently improves vision‑centric performance across various models, regimes, and benchmarks when only 3‑10% of the training data is augmented with these instructions.

By Sophia Sirko-Galouchenko, Monika Wysoczanska, Andrei Bursuc, Nicolas Thome, Spyros Gidaris