ViT-Split: Unleashing the Power of Vision Foundation Models via Efficient Splitting Heads

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Hauptverfasser: Li, Yifan, Li, Xin, Li, Tianqin, He, Wenbin, Kong, Yu, Ren, Liu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Li, Yifan
Li, Xin
Li, Tianqin
He, Wenbin
Kong, Yu
Ren, Liu
author_facet Li, Yifan
Li, Xin
Li, Tianqin
He, Wenbin
Kong, Yu
Ren, Liu
contents Vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of downstream tasks. While several VFM adapters have shown promising results by leveraging the prior knowledge of VFMs, we identify two inefficiencies in these approaches. First, the interaction between convolutional neural network (CNN) and VFM backbone triggers early layer gradient backpropagation. Second, existing methods require tuning all components, adding complexity. Besides, these adapters alter VFM features, underutilizing the prior knowledge. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new approach called ViT-Split, based on a key observation: the layers of several VFMs, like DINOv2, can be divided into two distinct components: an extractor for learning low-level features and an adapter for learning task-specific features. Leveraging this insight, we eliminate the CNN branch and introduce two heads, task head and prior head, to the frozen VFM. The task head is designed to learn task-specific features, mitigating the early gradient propagation issue. The prior head is used to leverage the multi-scale prior features from the frozen VFM, reducing tuning parameters and overfitting. Extensive experiments on various tasks (e.g., segmentation, detection, depth estimation, and visual question answering) validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ViT-Split. Specifically, ViT-Split reduces training time up to $4\times$ while achieving comparable or even better results on ADE20K, compared to other VFM adapters.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03433
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ViT-Split: Unleashing the Power of Vision Foundation Models via Efficient Splitting Heads
Li, Yifan
Li, Xin
Li, Tianqin
He, Wenbin
Kong, Yu
Ren, Liu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of downstream tasks. While several VFM adapters have shown promising results by leveraging the prior knowledge of VFMs, we identify two inefficiencies in these approaches. First, the interaction between convolutional neural network (CNN) and VFM backbone triggers early layer gradient backpropagation. Second, existing methods require tuning all components, adding complexity. Besides, these adapters alter VFM features, underutilizing the prior knowledge. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new approach called ViT-Split, based on a key observation: the layers of several VFMs, like DINOv2, can be divided into two distinct components: an extractor for learning low-level features and an adapter for learning task-specific features. Leveraging this insight, we eliminate the CNN branch and introduce two heads, task head and prior head, to the frozen VFM. The task head is designed to learn task-specific features, mitigating the early gradient propagation issue. The prior head is used to leverage the multi-scale prior features from the frozen VFM, reducing tuning parameters and overfitting. Extensive experiments on various tasks (e.g., segmentation, detection, depth estimation, and visual question answering) validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ViT-Split. Specifically, ViT-Split reduces training time up to $4\times$ while achieving comparable or even better results on ADE20K, compared to other VFM adapters.
title ViT-Split: Unleashing the Power of Vision Foundation Models via Efficient Splitting Heads
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03433