arXiv AI

Growing to See: Efficient Pretraining of Self-Supervised Vision Transformers

arXiv AI
Jun 15

Learning What to Predict: Downstream-Guided Task Design for Continued Pretraining

arXiv:2601. 22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities.

By Shuqi Ke, Giulia Fanti
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

DART: Depth-as-Target Pretraining for Surgical Vision Foundation Models

DART is a new RGB‑D pretraining method for surgical vision foundation models that incorporates pseudo‑labeled depth maps as a pixel‑space reconstruction target during training. By adding a depth reconstruction head to DINOv2’s masked iBOT framework, DART improves representation quality without affecting downstream RGB‑only fine‑tuning or inference. Across eight surgical benchmarks—including segmentation, depth estimation, and image‑level recognition—DART outperforms both natural‑image and in‑domain baselines, demonstrating that geometric pseudo‑labels can strengthen foundation model pretraining without extra labels or inference cost.

By John J. Han, Adam Schmidt, Muhammad Abdullah Jamal, Jie Ying Wu, Omid Mohareri
arXiv Computer Vision
2d ago

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.

By Siran Dai, Qianqian Xu, Peisong Wen, Yang Liu, Xiaochun Cao, Qingming Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 2

Information-Regularized Attention for Visual-Centric Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 00434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a paradigm for multimodal learning, yet remain unstable due to object hallucination, weak visual grounding, and catastrophic forgetting after full-parameter instruction tuning.

By Guohao Sun, Xiaofang Wang, Yash Patel, Mengchen Liu, Zhiqiang Tao, Praveen Krishnan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

MAETrack: Unleashing the Potential of Pretrained Geometric Priors for 3D Single Object Tracking

MAETrack introduces a lightweight framework to adapt pretrained masked autoencoder (MAE) representations for 3D single object tracking (SOT). It uses Layer‑Selective Initialization (LSI) to keep shallow geometric layers from the pre‑training while re‑initializing deeper layers, and Geometric Residual Gating (GRG) to emphasize salient regions in BEV features before template‑search fusion. Experiments on standard 3D SOT benchmarks show consistent improvements over vanilla fine‑tuning with minimal computational cost.

By Sifan Zhou, Qiwei Wang, Linyue Tan, Ziyu Liu, Ziyu Zhao, Xiaobo Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

One Block, Multiple Depths: Recurrent Vision Transformers with Depth-Programmed Experts

The paper introduces reViT, a recurrent vision transformer that uses a single Transformer block repeatedly to achieve the accuracy of a full-depth encoder while keeping inference FLOPs comparable. It achieves depth‑specific transformations by expressing each block’s feed‑forward network as a convex combination of a small shared expert bank, with a continuous depth coordinate guiding the mixture. Experiments on ImageNet‑1k and DINOv2 distillation show that reViT matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art models, reduces stored parameters by about 70%, and supports elastic‑depth deployment from a single checkpoint.

By Adrian Bulat, Yassine Ouali, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Successive Capacity Growth: Task-Complexity-Driven Width and Depth Expansion for Vision Transformer Encoders in JEPA World Models

The paper introduces Successive Capacity Growth (SCG), a method for adaptively expanding Vision Transformer encoders in Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs). SCG starts with a minimal encoder and incrementally increases width or depth based on a task‑agnostic test‑and‑verify mechanism, while a Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularizer (SIGReg) keeps learned semantic dimensions independent. Experiments on multi‑object dynamics and 2D navigation tasks show that SCG achieves up to 20.3% better prediction loss than fixed small baselines and 23% better than fixed large models, with far greater parameter efficiency and no false‑positive expansions.

By Frederik Berenz