arXiv Computer Vision

CoViT: Instance-Correspondence Contrastive Learning for Vision Transformer

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.

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

IronViT: Toward Efficient Generalist Visual Representation Learning

IronViT proposes a new approach to building efficient generalist vision encoders by first consolidating the knowledge of multiple specialist teachers into a softmax attention bridge and then transferring this consolidated representation to a hybrid softmax‑linear attention architecture. This two‑stage distillation process, supported by a curated data pipeline, allows the model to capture semantic, spatial, language‑aligned, and action‑relevant cues while avoiding the high‑resolution cost of traditional softmax attention. Across tasks such as recognition, retrieval, dense prediction, multimodal understanding, and robotic learning, IronViT matches or exceeds the performance of leading specialist and generalist encoders, with the hybrid encoder offering increasing efficiency at higher resolutions.

By Jiaxi Huang, Yueqi Hu, Xin Zhu, Xiaopeng Zhang, Huiting Qiao, Yanglin Zhang, Zefeng Ji, Rongxue Li, Yifei Xu, Huiying Yu, Wei Liu, Jiayin Zheng, Yinggan Xu, Peipeng Chen, Yin Zhang, Jian Yao