Charm: The Missing Piece in ViT fine-tuning for Image Aesthetic Assessment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Behrad, Fatemeh, Tuytelaars, Tinne, Wagemans, Johan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Behrad, Fatemeh
Tuytelaars, Tinne
Wagemans, Johan
author_facet Behrad, Fatemeh
Tuytelaars, Tinne
Wagemans, Johan
contents The capacity of Vision transformers (ViTs) to handle variable-sized inputs is often constrained by computational complexity and batch processing limitations. Consequently, ViTs are typically trained on small, fixed-size images obtained through downscaling or cropping. While reducing computational burden, these methods result in significant information loss, negatively affecting tasks like image aesthetic assessment. We introduce Charm, a novel tokenization approach that preserves Composition, High-resolution, Aspect Ratio, and Multi-scale information simultaneously. Charm prioritizes high-resolution details in specific regions while downscaling others, enabling shorter fixed-size input sequences for ViTs while incorporating essential information. Charm is designed to be compatible with pre-trained ViTs and their learned positional embeddings. By providing multiscale input and introducing variety to input tokens, Charm improves ViT performance and generalizability for image aesthetic assessment. We avoid cropping or changing the aspect ratio to further preserve information. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant performance improvements on various image aesthetic and quality assessment datasets (up to 8.1 %) using a lightweight ViT backbone. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/FBehrad/Charm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_02522
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Charm: The Missing Piece in ViT fine-tuning for Image Aesthetic Assessment
Behrad, Fatemeh
Tuytelaars, Tinne
Wagemans, Johan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The capacity of Vision transformers (ViTs) to handle variable-sized inputs is often constrained by computational complexity and batch processing limitations. Consequently, ViTs are typically trained on small, fixed-size images obtained through downscaling or cropping. While reducing computational burden, these methods result in significant information loss, negatively affecting tasks like image aesthetic assessment. We introduce Charm, a novel tokenization approach that preserves Composition, High-resolution, Aspect Ratio, and Multi-scale information simultaneously. Charm prioritizes high-resolution details in specific regions while downscaling others, enabling shorter fixed-size input sequences for ViTs while incorporating essential information. Charm is designed to be compatible with pre-trained ViTs and their learned positional embeddings. By providing multiscale input and introducing variety to input tokens, Charm improves ViT performance and generalizability for image aesthetic assessment. We avoid cropping or changing the aspect ratio to further preserve information. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant performance improvements on various image aesthetic and quality assessment datasets (up to 8.1 %) using a lightweight ViT backbone. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/FBehrad/Charm.
title Charm: The Missing Piece in ViT fine-tuning for Image Aesthetic Assessment
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02522