arXiv:2607.10391cs.CVcs.LG2026-07

通过融合ViT内部多层次特征,显著提升分类鲁棒性。

Vertical Fusion: Condensing Internal Representations for Robust ViT Classification

论文配图:Vertical Fusion: Condensing Internal Representations for Robust ViT Classification
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 提出垂直融合策略,利用ViT内部多层特征生成更优表示
  • 在16个数据集上,可纠正18%至76%的顶层误分类样本
  • 相比横向集成更高效,适用于不同模型规模和预训练方式

尽管视觉变换器(ViTs)具有丰富的中间表示,但几乎仅作为黑箱特征提取器使用,仅依赖最后一层进行下游任务。本文挑战这一惯例,引入可恢复性概念:中间表示纠正最后一层错误的能力。在16个数据集上评估各层级独立分类探针,发现中间探针能正确分类18%至76%的顶层误分类样本。研究表明,性能提升并非主要来自预测多样性,而是冗余-正确性对应关系——内部层次结构如同一系列稳定冗余的共享判别信号探针。现有横向集成方法虽有效,但计算成本高且忽略单模型内的垂直信号。为此,我们提出VFusion,一种基于可学习映射到低维潜在空间的垂直聚合策略,综合模型内部层次特征。在分布内与分布外设置中,VFusion显著优于现有基线,显著缩小45%的准确率差距(从最佳单层到理论最优)。该优势在不同模型规模与预训练策略下均一致,证实其稳健高效,是横向集成的有力替代方案。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Despite exposing rich intermediate representations, Vision Transformers (ViTs) are almost exclusively utilized as black-box feature extractors, where only the last layer is considered for downstream tasks. We challenge this convention by introducing the notion of recoverability: the capacity of intermediate representations to correct last-layer failures. By evaluating independent classification probes at every model depth across 16 datasets, we observe that intermediate probes correctly classify 18% to 76% of samples that the last-layer probe misclassifies. We show that these gains are not primarily driven by predictive diversity, but by a redundancy-correctness correspondence, where the internal hierarchy acts as a series of stable, redundant probes of a shared discriminative signal. While established horizontal ensemble strategies (i.e., across multiple models) can improve performance, they incur high computational cost and ignore this vertical signal within a single model. To bridge this gap, we propose VFusion, a principled vertical aggregation strategy employing a learnable mapping into a low-dimensional latent space that synthesizes features across the internal ViT hierarchy. VFusion substantially outperforms established aggregation baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, notably closing 45% of the accuracy gap between the best individual layer and a theoretical oracle performance. Our gains consistently generalize across model sizes and pre-training regimes, confirming that VFusion offers a robust and efficient alternative to horizontal ensemble methods. The code is available at https://github.com/francescodisalvo05/vit-vertical-fusion.

ViT特征融合鲁棒性深度学习

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