UNIFORM: Unifying Knowledge from Large-scale and Diverse Pre-trained Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yimu, Zhuang, Weiming, Chen, Chen, Huang, Jiabo, Li, Jingtao, Lyu, Lingjuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Yimu
Zhuang, Weiming
Chen, Chen
Huang, Jiabo
Li, Jingtao
Lyu, Lingjuan
author_facet Wang, Yimu
Zhuang, Weiming
Chen, Chen
Huang, Jiabo
Li, Jingtao
Lyu, Lingjuan
contents In the era of deep learning, the increasing number of pre-trained models available online presents a wealth of knowledge. These models, developed with diverse architectures and trained on varied datasets for different tasks, provide unique interpretations of the real world. Their collective consensus is likely universal and generalizable to unseen data. However, effectively harnessing this collective knowledge poses a fundamental challenge due to the heterogeneity of pre-trained models. Existing knowledge integration solutions typically rely on strong assumptions about training data distributions and network architectures, limiting them to learning only from specific types of models and resulting in data and/or inductive biases. In this work, we introduce a novel framework, namely UNIFORM, for knowledge transfer from a diverse set of off-the-shelf models into one student model without such constraints. Specifically, we propose a dedicated voting mechanism to capture the consensus of knowledge both at the logit level -- incorporating teacher models that are capable of predicting target classes of interest -- and at the feature level, utilizing visual representations learned on arbitrary label spaces. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UNIFORM effectively enhances unsupervised object recognition performance compared to strong knowledge transfer baselines. Notably, it exhibits remarkable scalability by benefiting from over one hundred teachers, while existing methods saturate at a much smaller scale.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19498
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UNIFORM: Unifying Knowledge from Large-scale and Diverse Pre-trained Models
Wang, Yimu
Zhuang, Weiming
Chen, Chen
Huang, Jiabo
Li, Jingtao
Lyu, Lingjuan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
In the era of deep learning, the increasing number of pre-trained models available online presents a wealth of knowledge. These models, developed with diverse architectures and trained on varied datasets for different tasks, provide unique interpretations of the real world. Their collective consensus is likely universal and generalizable to unseen data. However, effectively harnessing this collective knowledge poses a fundamental challenge due to the heterogeneity of pre-trained models. Existing knowledge integration solutions typically rely on strong assumptions about training data distributions and network architectures, limiting them to learning only from specific types of models and resulting in data and/or inductive biases. In this work, we introduce a novel framework, namely UNIFORM, for knowledge transfer from a diverse set of off-the-shelf models into one student model without such constraints. Specifically, we propose a dedicated voting mechanism to capture the consensus of knowledge both at the logit level -- incorporating teacher models that are capable of predicting target classes of interest -- and at the feature level, utilizing visual representations learned on arbitrary label spaces. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UNIFORM effectively enhances unsupervised object recognition performance compared to strong knowledge transfer baselines. Notably, it exhibits remarkable scalability by benefiting from over one hundred teachers, while existing methods saturate at a much smaller scale.
title UNIFORM: Unifying Knowledge from Large-scale and Diverse Pre-trained Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19498