解决视觉Transformer的高范数噪声问题,提升学生模型性能
SiNGER: A Clearer Voice Distills Vision Transformers Further
- 通过空域引导扰动精炼教师特征,抑制噪声同时保留有效信息
- 在多个下游任务中实现当前最优表现,显著提升表示清晰度
- 基于LoRA适配器轻量改造,易于集成到现有框架中
视觉Transformer广泛用作视觉基础模型的主干网络,但其常产生高范数伪影,降低表征质量。知识蒸馏过程中,这些伪影主导优化目标,导致学生模型过拟合伪影而忽略有用信号,削弱大模型的优势。已有方法试图消除伪影,但面临抑制伪影与保留教师有效信号之间的固有权衡。为此,本文提出奇异零空间引导的能量重分配(SiNGER)框架,通过有原则的教师特征精炼,在保持信息的同时抑制伪影。核心思想是利用零空间引导的扰动进行特征修正,再将精炼后的特征用于蒸馏。我们采用基于LoRA的适配器高效实现该扰动,仅需最小结构改动。大量实验表明,SiNGER持续提升学生模型性能,在多个下游任务中达到当前最优水平,并生成更清晰、可解释的表示。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision Transformers are widely adopted as the backbone of vision foundation models, but they are known to produce high-norm artifacts that degrade representation quality. When knowledge distillation transfers these features to students, high-norm artifacts dominate the objective, so students overfit to artifacts and underweight informative signals, diminishing the gains from larger models. Prior work attempted to remove artifacts but encountered an inherent trade-off between artifact suppression and preserving informative signals from teachers. To address this, we introduce Singular Nullspace-Guided Energy Reallocation (SiNGER), a novel distillation framework that suppresses artifacts while preserving informative signals. The key idea is principled teacher feature refinement: during refinement, we leverage the nullspace-guided perturbation to preserve information while suppressing artifacts. Then, the refined teacher's features are distilled to a student. We implement this perturbation efficiently with a LoRA-based adapter that requires minimal structural modification. Extensive experiments show that \oursname consistently improves student models, achieving state-of-the-art performance in multiple downstream tasks and producing clearer and more interpretable representations.
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