arXiv AI

The Cross-Architecture Substrate: A Domain-Transcendent, Calibration-Surviving Geometric Invariant of Modern Vision Encoders

arXiv:2606. 07882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Different vision neural networks -- trained to classify, contrast, reconstruct, or match images to text -- should have correspondingly different internal representations.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Cross-Architecture Knowledge Distillation from a Vision Foundation Model to a Lightweight Visual State Space Model for Tea Leaf Disease Classification

The paper presents a method for cross‑architecture knowledge distillation from a fine‑tuned DINOv2 Vision Transformer teacher to a lightweight bidirectional Visual State Space Model (LVSSM) student for tea leaf disease classification. By addressing training‑stability issues with a progressive convolutional stem and gated selective‑scan block, the 4.45 M‑parameter student achieves a mean test accuracy of 95.41%—a 3.09‑point improvement over the teacher’s 92.32%—while using only one‑fifth of the teacher’s parameters. Ablation studies show that simple logit‑level distillation outperforms intermediate feature alignment, and the gains are specific to students that start below the teacher’s performance.

By Zibo Zhou, Zongsen Qiu, Rui Chen, Yujie Yao, Yue Zhou, Jianjun Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Calibrating Retrieval Geometry: Reliability-Guided Training-Free Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition

The paper introduces TFA, a training‑free aggregation technique that calibrates frozen visual foundation models for visual place recognition. TFA uses cross‑codebook agreement, retrieval coverage, and spectral statistics to adjust residual assignment, spectral shaping, and global‑feature fusion without requiring place labels or task‑specific weights. Experiments with a DINOv2‑B backbone show significant Recall@1 gains over existing training‑free methods across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating that reliability‑guided aggregation can unlock additional retrieval performance from frozen representations.

By Xin Li, Zhimin Mao, Shang Wang, Siyuan Duan, Geng Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
2d ago

PixelDense: Dense Prediction as Representation Alignment for Pixel Diffusion

PixelDense introduces a dual‑stream representation alignment for pixel diffusion, separating semantic and geometric teachers (DINOv2, SAM2, Depth Anything v2, Metric3D v2) into distinct projection spaces with an orthogonality penalty. The method improves dense‑prediction benchmarks, boosting PixelGen‑XXL’s GenEval score from 0.7927 to 0.8093, achieving significant gains in panoptic quality and depth accuracy, and accelerating training from random initialization. It also enhances SDEdit editing by preserving background structure and increasing PSNR.

By Lehan Yang, Daiqing Qi, Wenhao Zhang, Avery Li, Yiqing Yang, Yifan Li, Yu Kong, Haitian Zheng, Zhifei Zhang, Zhe Lin, Varun Jampani, Sheng Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

STRADAViT: Self-Supervised Domain Adaptation of Vision Transformer Backbones for Radio Astronomy

STRADAViT is a self‑supervised continued‑pretraining framework that adapts Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones for radio‑astronomy image analysis. It curates mixed‑survey data, generates radio‑astronomy‑aware training views, and initializes encoders with ViT‑MAE, optionally adding register tokens. Evaluations on three morphology benchmarks (MiraBest, LoTSS DR2, and Radio Galaxy Zoo) show that a register‑based two‑stage checkpoint improves linear‑probe Macro‑F1 scores over the ViT‑MAE baseline and enhances fine‑tuning on MiraBest and RGZ DR1, though performance on LoTSS DR2 fine‑tuning declines; these differences are statistically significant.

By Andrea DeMarco, Ian Fenech Conti, Hayley Camilleri, Ardiana Bushi, Simone Riggi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

Not All Patches are Equal: Sampling Matters for Visible-Infrared Pre-Training

Visible-infrared (VIS-IR) alignment is a key pre-training task for robust multi-sensor perception. Most existing methods use uniform patch-wise contrastive learning, but this can be unreliable in VIS-IR data because imaging-physics differences make some spatially paired regions inherently less comparable, and aligning them with equal strength hinders representation learning and downstream transfer.