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
arXiv AI
Jul 13

ALICE: Learning a General-Purpose Pathology Foundation Model from Vision, Vision-Language, and Slide-Level Experts

arXiv:2607. 09526v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are reshaping computational pathology, yet their capabilities remain shaped by pretraining objectives, data sources, and spatial scales, fragmenting complementary expertise across separate backbones.

By Jiawen Li, Tian Guan, Huijuan Shi, Xitong Ling, Mingxi Fu, Anjia Han, Chao He, Yonghong He
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

Dyna-DINO: Efficient ViT Distillation Via Adaptive Representation Anchoring

Dyna‑DINO introduces a curriculum for Vision Transformer (ViT) knowledge distillation that uses the teacher’s intermediate feature maps as progressively harder targets, enabling a student to build foundational representations before tackling higher‑level abstractions. The approach accelerates convergence and improves performance across multiple tasks: on ImageNet‑100 the distilled ViT‑S reaches 90.1% accuracy (+12.24% over baseline), while on ImageNet‑1K it yields +3.9% and +6.09% gains on Oxford and Paris retrieval, +1.93% on semantic segmentation, and notable classification improvements. Additionally, the curriculum reduces training FLOPs by 25.1% and training time by 21% on ImageNet‑100 through early‑stopping of teacher inference.

By Jiaqi Zhang, Ashton Lee, Anthony Wong, John Zou, Sami BuGhanem, Randall Balestriero