ViTAMINS is a method that incorporates synthetic hard negatives into unsupervised vision transformer pretraining to enhance representation quality. The approach is evaluated on ImageNet and a range of downstream tasks—including transfer learning, image retrieval, copy detection, and image/video segmentation—showing significant performance gains. The synthetic negatives also lead to emergent properties, such as representations that encode explicit semantic information and act as strong classifiers, improving over baselines by up to 11.3%.
arXiv:2608. 14922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has recently expanded to Vision Transformers (ViTs), with Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) increasingly used as post-hoc tools to decompose internal representations into sparse and more interpretable features.
MLLMCLIP introduces a heterogeneous distillation framework that transfers multimodal knowledge from a generative Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) teacher directly into a discriminative CLIP student, eliminating the need for synthetic hard negatives. The method uses an attention-based per-layer token selection and a CKA-based distillation loss to bridge architectural differences between the two models. As a result, MLLMCLIP achieves state‑of‑the‑art compositional accuracy and improves zero‑shot classification and image‑text retrieval performance.
arXiv:2609.06967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ensuring effective transfer learning for vision-language models without compromising their generalization performance is crucial. However, many exist...
Pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP excel at zero-shot recognition but often fail at compositionality, particularly attribute-object and relational structures. Recent studies mitigate this...
CoViT introduces a self‑supervised framework that enhances Vision Transformers with instance‑aware representations by leveraging geometry‑guided contrastive learning. It refines attention maps to generate instance masks and constructs triplets that mine the hardest intra‑ and inter‑instance examples, driving a contrastive loss that reduces intra‑instance variance while increasing inter‑instance margins. The method yields consistent AP gains of over 2 points on instance‑level tasks without requiring extra decoders or labels.
The paper explores contrastive self‑supervised learning (SSL) for retinal fundus image classification, comparing SimSiam and SimCLR under limited data and computational resources. It investigates how retinal‑specific augmentation strategies and training parameters affect representation quality, evaluated through linear probing and fine‑tuning on multi‑disease classification and diabetic retinopathy grading tasks. The results demonstrate that tailored augmentations enable lightweight SSL models to learn transferable representations, reducing reliance on large annotated datasets while achieving competitive performance.
Learning-State-Aware Dynamic Generative Data Augmentation on Small-Scale Datasets proposes LSADA, a method that constructs a learning state for each sample based on its loss and loss‑decrease rate to determine a sample‑specific augmentation strength. LSADA also introduces a decoupled data augmentation and diffusion fusion strategy that applies strength‑controlled transformations to class‑relevant regions while generating diverse class‑irrelevant regions, progressively fusing them to enhance image diversity while preserving class semantics. Experiments on nine public datasets demonstrate that LSADA outperforms the current state‑of‑the‑art dynamic GDA method by an average of 4.5% on six natural image datasets and 2.5% on three medical image datasets.
arXiv:2607. 00784v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language pretraining remains dominated by contrastive objectives, whereas vision-only self-supervised learning has largely adopted non-contrastive methods.
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:2604. 20329v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent works show that image and video generators exhibit zero-shot visual understanding behaviors, in a way reminiscent of how LLMs develop emergent capabilities of language understanding and reasoning from generative pretraining.
arXiv:2407.03463v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the realm of self-supervised learning (SSL), conventional wisdom has gravitated towards the utility of massive, general domain datasets fo...
arXiv:2608. 00716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust detection of generated images is critical to counter the misuse of generative models.