Papers › DR-Tune: Improving Fine-tuning of Pretrained Visual Models by Distribution...

DR-Tune: Improving Fine-tuning of Pretrained Visual Models by Distribution Regularization with Semantic Calibration

23 Aug 2023ICCV 2023 1arXiv:2308.12058archive 2025-07-28

Nan Zhou, Jiaxin Chen, Di Huang

The visual models pretrained on large-scale benchmarks encode general knowledge and prove effective in building more powerful representations for downstream tasks. Most existing approaches follow the fine-tuning paradigm, either by initializing or regularizing the downstream model based on the pretrained one. The former fails to retain the knowledge in the successive fine-tuning phase, thereby prone to be over-fitting, and the latter imposes strong constraints to the weights or feature maps of the downstream model without considering semantic drift, often incurring insufficient optimization. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework, namely distribution regularization with semantic calibration (DR-Tune). It employs distribution regularization by enforcing the downstream task head to decrease its classification error on the pretrained feature distribution, which prevents it from over-fitting while enabling sufficient training of downstream encoders. Furthermore, to alleviate the interference by semantic drift, we develop the semantic calibration (SC) module to align the global shape and class centers of the pretrained and downstream feature distributions. Extensive experiments on widely used image classification datasets show that DR-Tune consistently improves the performance when combing with various backbones under different pretraining strategies. Code is available at: https://github.com/weeknan/DR-Tune.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

weeknan/dr-tune officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

General KnowledgeImage Classificationimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

ALIGN

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections