arXiv Machine Learning

JEDI: JEPA-to-Edge Distillation for Efficient Cropland Segmentation from Satellite Imagery

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
Oct 2

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
Oct 16

Data-Efficient ConvNeXt Pretraining for High-Resolution Sentinel-1 GRD SAR Representation Learning

The paper introduces SparK-SAR, a sparse convolutional masked pretraining framework that leverages ConvNeXt for high‑resolution Sentinel‑1 GRD SAR data. It presents three key contributions: a domain‑adapted ConvNeXt‑RS encoder with a reduced stem stride, a lightweight ConvNeXt‑512 decoder that cuts VRAM usage while matching UNet accuracy, and an analysis of FP16 instability and layer‑wise learning‑rate decay benefits. Experiments on four Copernicus‑Bench S1GRD tasks show that the 27.8 M‑parameter ConvNeXt‑RS encoder outperforms a larger ViT baseline on most tasks and demonstrates strong data efficiency, with classification saturating at 10–25 % of the SSL4EO‑S12 corpus.

By Yuki Natsume, Sang-Ho Yun, Chai Kiat Yeo
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 12

JMT-YOLO: Multi-task Domain Adaptation via Segmentation-Guided Consistency Learning

JMT-YOLO is a new joint multi-task learning framework for domain adaptive object detection that builds on the Mean Teacher architecture. It adds an auxiliary semantic segmentation task and a masking mechanism to better model foreground–background boundaries and improve instance-level alignment. Experiments on Pascal VOC→Clipart1k, Cityscapes→Foggy Cityscapes, and KITTI→Cityscapes show that JMT‑YOLO outperforms existing state‑of‑the‑art methods, achieving 46.9%, 57.3%, and 61.0% detection performance respectively.

By Zhenhua Yu, Jiahao Zhang, Wenchao Zhang, Ou Ye, Hengxiang Zhao
arXiv AI
Aug 26

PhysMLLMs: Spatial Priors for Unified Referring Segmentation and Grounded Reasoning of Images and Videos

PhysMLLMs introduces physics-inspired spatial continuity priors into video multimodal large language models to address spatio‑temporal inconsistencies such as jitter, drift, and identity switches. The method, called Global Representation Prior Alignment (REPA‑Global), distills global visual representations from a frozen DINOv2 teacher during training, aligning student representations without affecting inference speed. Experiments on multiple video benchmarks show improved segmentation mask quality and cross‑frame consistency, especially for challenging scenarios involving small targets, fast motion, occlusion, and distractors, while maintaining comparable performance on single‑frame image segmentation and general VLM tasks.

By Siyao Yan, Bo Han, Jisheng Dang, Bimei Wang, Shude Wang, Hong Peng, Yulan Guo, Jianhuang Lai, Bin Hu, Tat-SengChua