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Main Authors: Rodas, Bryan, Montesino, Natalie, Ambsdorf, Jakob, Klindt, David, Balestriero, Randall
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06990
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author Rodas, Bryan
Montesino, Natalie
Ambsdorf, Jakob
Klindt, David
Balestriero, Randall
author_facet Rodas, Bryan
Montesino, Natalie
Ambsdorf, Jakob
Klindt, David
Balestriero, Randall
contents Continued pretraining offers a promising solution for adapting foundation models to a new target domain. However, in specialized domains, available datasets are often very small, limiting the applicability of SSL methods developed for large-scale pretraining and making hyperparameter search infeasible. In addition, pretrained models are usually released as backbone-weights only, lacking important information to continue pretraining. We propose to bridge this gap with DIET-CP, a simple continued pretraining strategy, where any strong foundation model can be steered towards the new data distribution of interest. DIET-CP relies on a very simple objective, requires no labels, and introduces no more hyperparameters than supervised finetuning. It is stable across data modalities and backbone choices, while providing a significant performance boost for state-of-the-art models such as DINOv3 using only 1000 images.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_06990
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DIET-CP: Lightweight and Data Efficient Self Supervised Continued Pretraining
Rodas, Bryan
Montesino, Natalie
Ambsdorf, Jakob
Klindt, David
Balestriero, Randall
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
I.2; I.4
Continued pretraining offers a promising solution for adapting foundation models to a new target domain. However, in specialized domains, available datasets are often very small, limiting the applicability of SSL methods developed for large-scale pretraining and making hyperparameter search infeasible. In addition, pretrained models are usually released as backbone-weights only, lacking important information to continue pretraining. We propose to bridge this gap with DIET-CP, a simple continued pretraining strategy, where any strong foundation model can be steered towards the new data distribution of interest. DIET-CP relies on a very simple objective, requires no labels, and introduces no more hyperparameters than supervised finetuning. It is stable across data modalities and backbone choices, while providing a significant performance boost for state-of-the-art models such as DINOv3 using only 1000 images.
title DIET-CP: Lightweight and Data Efficient Self Supervised Continued Pretraining
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
I.2; I.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06990