Similar to Vision Transformers, this paper identifies artifacts also present within the feature maps of Vision Mamba. These artifacts, corresponding to high-norm tokens emerging in low-information background areas of images, appear much more severe in Vision Mamba—they exist prevalently even with the tiny-sized model and activate extensively across background regions. To mitigate this issue, we follow the prior solution of introducing register tokens into Vision Mamba. To better cope with Mamba blocks’ uni-directional inference paradigm, two key modifications are introduced: 1) evenly inserting registers throughout the input token sequence, and 2) recycling registers for final decision predictions. We term this new architecture Mamba®. Qualitative observations suggest, compared to vanilla Vision Mamba, Mamba®’s feature maps appear cleaner and more focused on semantically meaningful regions. Quantitatively, Mamba®attains stronger performance and scales better. For example, on the ImageNet benchmark, our Mamba®-B attains 83.0% accuracy, significantly outperforming Vim-B’s 81.8%; furthermore, we provide the first successful scaling to the large model size with 341M parameters, attaining competitive accuracies of 83.6% and 84.5% for 224×224 and 384×384 inputs, respectively. Additional validation on the downstream semantic segmentation task also supports Mamba®’s efficacy. Code is available at https://github.com/wangf3014/Mamba-Reg.

series models where we treat images as sequences of patch tokens and employ uni-directional language models to learn visual representations. This modeling paradigm allows us to process images in a recurrent formulation with linear complexity relative to the sequence length, which can effectively address the memory and computation explosion issues posed by high-resolution and fine-grained images. In detail, we introduce two simple designs that seamlessly integrate image inputs into the causal inference framework: a global pooling token placed at the beginning of the sequence and a flipping operation between every two layers. Extensive empirical studies highlight that compared with the existing plain architectures such as DeiT [46] and Vim [57], Adventurer offers an optimal efficiency-accuracy trade-off. For example, our Adventurer-Base attains a competitive test accuracy of 84.3% on the standard ImageNet-1k benchmark with 216 images/s training throughput, which is 3.8× and 6.2× faster than Vim and DeiT to achieve the same result. As Adventurer offers great computation and memory efficiency and allows scaling with linear complexity, we hope this architecture can benefit future explorations in modeling long sequences for high-resolution or fine-grained images. Code is available at https://github.com/wangf3014/Adventurer.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have delivered remarkable progress through global self-attention, yet their quadratic complexity can become prohibitive for high-resolution inputs. In this work, we present ViT-Linearizer, a cross-architecture distillation framework that transfers rich ViT representations into a linear-time, recurrent-style model. Our approach leverages 1) activation matching, an intermediate constraint that encourages student to align its token-wise dependencies with those produced by the teacher, and 2) masked prediction, a contextual reconstruction objective that requires the student to predict the teacher's representations for unseen (masked) tokens, to effectively distill the quadratic self-attention knowledge into the student while maintaining efficient complexity. Empirically, our method provides notable speedups particularly for high-resolution tasks, significantly addressing the hardware challenges in inference. Additionally, it also elevates Mamba-based architectures' performance on standard vision benchmarks, achieving a competitive 84.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with a base-sized model. Our results underscore the good potential of RNN-based solutions for large-scale visual tasks, bridging the gap between theoretical efficiency and real-world practice.

Training multiple deep neural networks (DNNs) and averaging their outputs is a simple way to improve the predictive performance. Nevertheless, the multiplied training cost prevents this ensemble method to be practical and efficient. Several recent works attempt to save and ensemble the checkpoints of DNNs, which only requires the same computational cost as training a single network. However, these methods suffer from either marginal accuracy improvements due to the low diversity of checkpoints or high risk of divergence due to the cyclical learning rates they adopted. In this paper, we propose a novel method to ensemble the checkpoints, where a boosting scheme is utilized to accelerate model convergence and maximize the checkpoint diversity. We theoretically prove that it converges by reducing exponential loss. The empirical evaluation also indicates our proposed ensemble outperforms single model and existing ensembles in terms of accuracy and efficiency. With the same training budget, our method achieves 4.16% lower error on Cifar-100 and 6.96% on Tiny-ImageNet with ResNet-110 architecture. Moreover, the adaptive sample weights in our method make it an effective solution to address the imbalanced class distribution. In the experiments, it yields up to 5.02% higher accuracy over single EfficientNet-B0 on the imbalanced datasets.