Papers › When Do We Not Need Larger Vision Models?

When Do We Not Need Larger Vision Models?

19 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.13043archive 2025-07-28

Baifeng Shi, Ziyang Wu, Maolin Mao, Xin Wang, Trevor Darrell

Scaling up the size of vision models has been the de facto standard to obtain more powerful visual representations. In this work, we discuss the point beyond which larger vision models are not necessary. First, we demonstrate the power of Scaling on Scales (S²), whereby a pre-trained and frozen smaller vision model (e.g., ViT-B or ViT-L), run over multiple image scales, can outperform larger models (e.g., ViT-H or ViT-G) on classification, segmentation, depth estimation, Multimodal LLM (MLLM) benchmarks, and robotic manipulation. Notably, S² achieves state-of-the-art performance in detailed understanding of MLLM on the V* benchmark, surpassing models such as GPT-4V. We examine the conditions under which S² is a preferred scaling approach compared to scaling on model size. While larger models have the advantage of better generalization on hard examples, we show that features of larger vision models can be well approximated by those of multi-scale smaller models. This suggests most, if not all, of the representations learned by current large pre-trained models can also be obtained from multi-scale smaller models. Our results show that a multi-scale smaller model has comparable learning capacity to a larger model, and pre-training smaller models with S² can match or even exceed the advantage of larger models. We release a Python package that can apply S² on any vision model with one line of code: https://github.com/bfshi/scaling_on_scales.

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