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| Auteurs principaux: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2025
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| Accès en ligne: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14707 |
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| _version_ | 1866911154779979776 |
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| author | Huang, Jiabo Chen, Chen Lyu, Lingjuan |
| author_facet | Huang, Jiabo Chen, Chen Lyu, Lingjuan |
| contents | Vision foundation models (VFMs) are predominantly developed using data-centric methods. These methods require training on vast amounts of data usually with high-quality labels, which poses a bottleneck for most institutions that lack both large-scale data and high-end GPUs. On the other hand, many open-source vision models have been pretrained on domain-specific data, enabling them to distill and represent core knowledge in a form that is transferable across diverse applications. Even though these models are highly valuable assets, they remain largely under-explored in empowering the development of a general-purpose VFM. In this paper, we present a new model-driven approach for training VFMs through joint knowledge transfer and preservation. Our method unifies multiple pre-trained teacher models in a shared latent space to mitigate the ``imbalanced transfer'' issue caused by their distributional gaps. Besides, we introduce a knowledge preservation strategy to take a general-purpose teacher as a knowledge base for integrating knowledge from the remaining purpose-specific teachers using an adapter module. By unifying and aggregating existing models, we build a powerful VFM to inherit teachers' expertise without needing to train on a large amount of labeled data. Our model not only provides generalizable visual features, but also inherently supports multiple downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VFM outperforms existing data-centric models across four fundamental vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic and instance segmentation. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_14707 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Seeing Further on the Shoulders of Giants: Knowledge Inheritance for Vision Foundation Models Huang, Jiabo Chen, Chen Lyu, Lingjuan Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Vision foundation models (VFMs) are predominantly developed using data-centric methods. These methods require training on vast amounts of data usually with high-quality labels, which poses a bottleneck for most institutions that lack both large-scale data and high-end GPUs. On the other hand, many open-source vision models have been pretrained on domain-specific data, enabling them to distill and represent core knowledge in a form that is transferable across diverse applications. Even though these models are highly valuable assets, they remain largely under-explored in empowering the development of a general-purpose VFM. In this paper, we present a new model-driven approach for training VFMs through joint knowledge transfer and preservation. Our method unifies multiple pre-trained teacher models in a shared latent space to mitigate the ``imbalanced transfer'' issue caused by their distributional gaps. Besides, we introduce a knowledge preservation strategy to take a general-purpose teacher as a knowledge base for integrating knowledge from the remaining purpose-specific teachers using an adapter module. By unifying and aggregating existing models, we build a powerful VFM to inherit teachers' expertise without needing to train on a large amount of labeled data. Our model not only provides generalizable visual features, but also inherently supports multiple downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VFM outperforms existing data-centric models across four fundamental vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic and instance segmentation. |
| title | Seeing Further on the Shoulders of Giants: Knowledge Inheritance for Vision Foundation Models |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14707 |