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Poster

SINDER: Repairing the Singular Defects of DINOv2

Haoqi Wang · Tong Zhang · Mathieu Salzmann

Strong blind review: This paper was not made available on public preprint services during the review process Strong Double Blind
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Thu 3 Oct 1:30 a.m. PDT — 3:30 a.m. PDT

Abstract:

Vision Transformer models trained on large-scale datasets, although effective, often exhibit artifacts in the patch token they extract. While such defects can be alleviated by re-training the entire model with additional classification tokens, the underlying reasons for the presence of these tokens remain unclear. In this paper, we conduct a thorough investigation of this phenomenon, combining theoretical analysis with empirical observations. Our findings reveal that these artifacts originate from the pre-trained network itself, specifically stemming from the leading left singular vector of the network's weights. Furthermore, to mitigate these defects, we propose a novel fine-tuning smooth regularization that rectifies structural deficiencies using only a small dataset, thereby avoiding the need for complete re-training. We validate our method on various downstream tasks, including unsupervised segmentation, classification, and supervised segmentation, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving model performance. Our code and checkpoints will be released.

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