Two Global Crops Suffice: Locating Semantic Emergence in DINO-Style Self-Supervised Learning

2026-09-23

AI Summary

研究通过几何不同全局视图的一致性解决了DINO风格自监督学习中的语义表示质量问题。

Abstract

Self-supervised vision transformers trained with DINO-style objectives exhibit striking emergent semantic representation quality across visual tasks, yet the mechanisms underlying this behavior remain unclear. We present a systematic empirical dissection of the DINO family and show that semantic representations arise primarily from enforcing consistency between geometrically distinct global views of the same image instance. This instance-specific global alignment acts as the semantic anchor of DINO-style learning. Across controlled retraining experiments evaluated on semantic correspondence and a diverse suite of 2D and 3D downstream tasks, we find that patch-level masking objectives enhance semantics only when trained jointly with this global alignment, indicating that the iBOT objective refines and densifies existing semantic structure rather than creating it independently. In contrast, local-to-global view alignment does not substantially improve semantic qualities at fixed compute beyond a purely global alignment. Beyond training design, we revisit how semantic representation quality should be evaluated: while classification accuracy is the standard validation score, semantic correspondence provides a complementary axis that more reliably predicts downstream task performance. Together, these findings provide a functional decomposition of DINO-style learning and represent an important step toward understanding how semantic representations emerge in self-supervised vision models.

Problem

• DINO-style learning
• semantic representation quality
• self-supervised vision transformers
• emergent behavior

Innovation

• global alignment
• semantic emergence
• self-supervised learning
• DINO-style objectives
• semantic correspondence