Papers › LiFT: A Surprisingly Simple Lightweight Feature Transform for Dense ViT Descriptors
LiFT: A Surprisingly Simple Lightweight Feature Transform for Dense ViT Descriptors
Saksham Suri, Matthew Walmer, Kamal Gupta, Abhinav Shrivastava
We present a simple self-supervised method to enhance the performance of ViT features for dense downstream tasks. Our Lightweight Feature Transform (LiFT) is a straightforward and compact postprocessing network that can be applied to enhance the features of any pre-trained ViT backbone. LiFT is fast and easy to train with a self-supervised objective, and it boosts the density of ViT features for minimal extra inference cost. Furthermore, we demonstrate that LiFT can be applied with approaches that use additional task-specific downstream modules, as we integrate LiFT with ViTDet for COCO detection and segmentation. Despite the simplicity of LiFT, we find that it is not simply learning a more complex version of bilinear interpolation. Instead, our LiFT training protocol leads to several desirable emergent properties that benefit ViT features in dense downstream tasks. This includes greater scale invariance for features, and better object boundary maps. By simply training LiFT for a few epochs, we show improved performance on keypoint correspondence, detection, segmentation, and object discovery tasks. Overall, LiFT provides an easy way to unlock the benefits of denser feature arrays for a fraction of the computational cost. For more details, refer to our project page at https://www.cs.umd.edu/~sakshams/LiFT/.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feature Upsampling | ImageNet | LiFT | ADCC | 53.0 | #8 of 8 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Feature Upsampling | ImageNet | LiFT | Average Drop | 66.9 | #8 of 8 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Feature Upsampling | ImageNet | LiFT | Average Increase | 8.7 | #8 of 8 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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