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Autori principali: Barreiro, Víctor, Jakubik, Johannes, Argüello, Francisco, Heras, Dora B.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19873
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author Barreiro, Víctor
Jakubik, Johannes
Argüello, Francisco
Heras, Dora B.
author_facet Barreiro, Víctor
Jakubik, Johannes
Argüello, Francisco
Heras, Dora B.
contents Fine-tuning foundation models for Earth Observation is computationally expensive, with high training time and memory demands for both training and deployment. Parameter-efficient methods reduce training cost but retain full inference complexity, while post-hoc compression optimizes inference only after costly full fine-tuning. We introduce SIMPLER, a pre-fine-tuning architecture selection method that reduces inference and deployment costs by identifying an effective model depth before adaptation. SIMPLER exploits stabilization of representations in deeper layers of pre-trained vision transformers: it computes layer-wise representation similarity on unlabeled task data and applies an automated scoring function to select redundant layers, with no gradients, magnitude heuristics, or hyperparameter tuning required. On Prithvi-EO-2, SIMPLER prunes up to 79% of parameters while retaining 94% of baseline performance, yielding a 2.1x training speedup and 2.6x inference speedup. The method generalizes to TerraMind (a multimodal EO foundation model) and ImageNet-pretrained ViT-MAE, demonstrating applicability across tasks, architectures, and spectral modalities. Code is available at https://gitlab.citius.gal/hpc4rs/simpler.
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spellingShingle SIMPLER: Efficient Foundation Model Adaptation via Similarity-Guided Layer Pruning for Earth Observation
Barreiro, Víctor
Jakubik, Johannes
Argüello, Francisco
Heras, Dora B.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Fine-tuning foundation models for Earth Observation is computationally expensive, with high training time and memory demands for both training and deployment. Parameter-efficient methods reduce training cost but retain full inference complexity, while post-hoc compression optimizes inference only after costly full fine-tuning. We introduce SIMPLER, a pre-fine-tuning architecture selection method that reduces inference and deployment costs by identifying an effective model depth before adaptation. SIMPLER exploits stabilization of representations in deeper layers of pre-trained vision transformers: it computes layer-wise representation similarity on unlabeled task data and applies an automated scoring function to select redundant layers, with no gradients, magnitude heuristics, or hyperparameter tuning required. On Prithvi-EO-2, SIMPLER prunes up to 79% of parameters while retaining 94% of baseline performance, yielding a 2.1x training speedup and 2.6x inference speedup. The method generalizes to TerraMind (a multimodal EO foundation model) and ImageNet-pretrained ViT-MAE, demonstrating applicability across tasks, architectures, and spectral modalities. Code is available at https://gitlab.citius.gal/hpc4rs/simpler.
title SIMPLER: Efficient Foundation Model Adaptation via Similarity-Guided Layer Pruning for Earth Observation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19873