SINDER: Repairing the Singular Defects of DINOv2
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, supervised segmentation, and depth estimation, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving model performance. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/haoqiwang/sinder.
WOS:001346380800002
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2025-01-01
CHAM
978-3-031-72666-8
978-3-031-72667-5
Lecture Notes in Computer Science; 15065
0302-9743
1611-3349
20
35
REVIEWED
EPFL
Event name | Event acronym | Event place | Event date |
Milan, ITALY | 2024-09-29 - 2024-10-04 | ||