GenHancer: Imperfect Generative Models are Secretly Strong Vision-Centric Enhancers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ma, Shijie, Ge, Yuying, Wang, Teng, Guo, Yuxin, Ge, Yixiao, Shan, Ying
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Ma, Shijie
Ge, Yuying
Wang, Teng
Guo, Yuxin
Ge, Yixiao
Shan, Ying
author_facet Ma, Shijie
Ge, Yuying
Wang, Teng
Guo, Yuxin
Ge, Yixiao
Shan, Ying
contents The synergy between generative and discriminative models receives growing attention. While discriminative Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) excels in high-level semantics, it struggles with perceiving fine-grained visual details. Generally, to enhance representations, generative models take CLIP's visual features as conditions for reconstruction. However, the underlying principle remains underexplored. In this work, we empirically found that visually perfect generations are not always optimal for representation enhancement. The essence lies in effectively extracting fine-grained knowledge from generative models while mitigating irrelevant information. To explore critical factors, we delve into three aspects: (1) Conditioning mechanisms: We found that even a small number of local tokens can drastically reduce the difficulty of reconstruction, leading to collapsed training. We thus conclude that utilizing only global visual tokens as conditions is the most effective strategy. (2) Denoising configurations: We observed that end-to-end training introduces extraneous information. To address this, we propose a two-stage training strategy to prioritize learning useful visual knowledge. Additionally, we demonstrate that lightweight denoisers can yield remarkable improvements. (3) Generation paradigms: We explore both continuous and discrete denoisers with desirable outcomes, validating the versatility of our method. Through our in-depth explorations, we have finally arrived at an effective method, namely GenHancer, which consistently outperforms prior arts on the MMVP-VLM benchmark, e.g., 6.0% on OpenAICLIP. The enhanced CLIP can be further plugged into multimodal large language models for better vision-centric performance. All the models and codes are made publicly available.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GenHancer: Imperfect Generative Models are Secretly Strong Vision-Centric Enhancers
Ma, Shijie
Ge, Yuying
Wang, Teng
Guo, Yuxin
Ge, Yixiao
Shan, Ying
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The synergy between generative and discriminative models receives growing attention. While discriminative Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) excels in high-level semantics, it struggles with perceiving fine-grained visual details. Generally, to enhance representations, generative models take CLIP's visual features as conditions for reconstruction. However, the underlying principle remains underexplored. In this work, we empirically found that visually perfect generations are not always optimal for representation enhancement. The essence lies in effectively extracting fine-grained knowledge from generative models while mitigating irrelevant information. To explore critical factors, we delve into three aspects: (1) Conditioning mechanisms: We found that even a small number of local tokens can drastically reduce the difficulty of reconstruction, leading to collapsed training. We thus conclude that utilizing only global visual tokens as conditions is the most effective strategy. (2) Denoising configurations: We observed that end-to-end training introduces extraneous information. To address this, we propose a two-stage training strategy to prioritize learning useful visual knowledge. Additionally, we demonstrate that lightweight denoisers can yield remarkable improvements. (3) Generation paradigms: We explore both continuous and discrete denoisers with desirable outcomes, validating the versatility of our method. Through our in-depth explorations, we have finally arrived at an effective method, namely GenHancer, which consistently outperforms prior arts on the MMVP-VLM benchmark, e.g., 6.0% on OpenAICLIP. The enhanced CLIP can be further plugged into multimodal large language models for better vision-centric performance. All the models and codes are made publicly available.
title GenHancer: Imperfect Generative Models are Secretly Strong Vision-Centric Enhancers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19480