Tobias Christian Nauen

Tobias Christian Nauen, Stanislav Frolov, Federico Raue et al.

CutMix has become the de facto standard mixing augmentation, yet its label assignment rests on a flawed assumption: The area of the pasted patch faithfully reflects its semantic contribution to the mixed image. In practice, however, patches frequently land on background regions, assigning label credit to classes whose objects are not visible. The mean discrepancy of the CutMix label and the semantic object area is $21.5\%$. In $17\%$ of samples an image contributes zero visible object pixels yet receives nonzero label weight. We propose Object-Aware CutMix (OA-CutMix), which corrects this bias by replacing the area-based CutMix weight with one derived from precomputed segmentation masks, assigning labels in proportion to the visible object area each image contributes to the mix. The image mixing procedure is left entirely unchanged. We evaluate OA-CutMix against 10+ static and dynamic mixing methods across 4 architectures and 6 datasets. OA-CutMix consistently achieves the highest accuracy over all tasks, outperforming even dynamic mixing methods, but at a fraction of the training-time cost. Improvements are largest for small objects, where the label bias from CutMix is greatest. Thus, correcting the label is sufficient to match or exceed the performance of methods modifying the image mixing algorithm.

Tobias Christian Nauen, Sebastian Palacio, Federico Raue et al.

Self-attention in Transformers comes with a high computational cost because of their quadratic computational complexity, but their effectiveness in addressing problems in language and vision has sparked extensive research aimed at enhancing their efficiency. However, diverse experimental conditions, spanning multiple input domains, prevent a fair comparison based solely on reported results, posing challenges for model selection. To address this gap in comparability, we perform a large-scale benchmark of more than 45 models for image classification, evaluating key efficiency aspects, including accuracy, speed, and memory usage. Our benchmark provides a standardized baseline for efficiency-oriented transformers. We analyze the results based on the Pareto front -- the boundary of optimal models. Surprisingly, despite claims of other models being more efficient, ViT remains Pareto optimal across multiple metrics. We observe that hybrid attention-CNN models exhibit remarkable inference memory- and parameter-efficiency. Moreover, our benchmark shows that using a larger model in general is more efficient than using higher resolution images. Thanks to our holistic evaluation, we provide a centralized resource for practitioners and researchers, facilitating informed decisions when selecting or developing efficient transformers.

Tobias Christian Nauen, Stanislav Frolov, Brian Bernhard Moser et al.

The platonic representation hypothesis suggests that sufficiently large models converge to a shared representation geometry, even across modalities. Motivated by this, we ask: Can the semantic knowledge of a language model efficiently improve a vision model? As an answer, we introduce TextTeacher, a simple auxiliary objective that injects text embeddings as additional information into image classification training. TextTeacher uses readily available image captions, a pre-trained and frozen text encoder, and a lightweight projection to produce semantic anchors that efficiently guide representations during training while leaving the inference-time model unchanged. On ImageNet with standard ViT backbones, TextTeacher improves accuracy by up to +2.7 percentage points (p.p.) and yields consistent transfer gains (on average +1.0 p.p.) under the same recipe and compute. It outperforms vision knowledge distillation, yielding more accuracy at a constant compute budget or similar accuracy, but 33% faster. Our analysis indicates that TextTeacher acts as a feature-space preconditioner, shaping deeper layers in the first stages of training, and aiding generalization by supplying complementary semantic cues. TextTeacher adds negligible overhead, requires no costly multimodal training of the target model and preserves the simplicity and latency of pure vision models. Project page with code and captions: https://nauen-it.de/publications/text-teacher

Krzysztof Adamkiewicz, Brian Moser, Stanislav Frolov et al.

Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models produce visually stunning images and demonstrate excellent prompt following. But do they perform well as synthetic vision data generators? In this work, we revisit the promise of synthetic data as a scalable substitute for real training sets and uncover a surprising performance regression. We generate large-scale synthetic datasets using state-of-the-art T2I models released between 2022 and 2025, train standard classifiers solely on this synthetic data, and evaluate them on real test data. Despite observable advances in visual fidelity and prompt adherence, classification accuracy on real test data consistently declines with newer T2I models as training data generators. Our analysis reveals a hidden trend: These models collapse to a narrow, aesthetic-centric distribution that undermines diversity and label-image alignment. Overall, our findings challenge a growing assumption in vision research, namely that progress in generative realism implies progress in data realism. We thus highlight an urgent need to rethink the capabilities of modern T2I models as reliable training data generators.

Tobias Christian Nauen, Sebastian Palacio, Andreas Dengel

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism represents one of the biggest hurdles for processing long sequences using Transformers. Current methods, relying on sparse representations or stateful recurrence, sacrifice token-to-token interactions, which ultimately leads to compromises in performance. This paper introduces TaylorShift, a novel reformulation of the Taylor softmax that enables computing full token-to-token interactions in linear time and space. We analytically determine the crossover points where employing TaylorShift becomes more efficient than traditional attention, aligning closely with empirical measurements. Specifically, our findings demonstrate that TaylorShift enhances memory efficiency for sequences as short as 800 tokens and accelerates inference for inputs of approximately 1700 tokens and beyond. For shorter sequences, TaylorShift scales comparably with the vanilla attention. Furthermore, a classification benchmark across five tasks involving long sequences reveals no degradation in accuracy when employing Transformers equipped with TaylorShift. For reproducibility, we provide access to our code under https://github.com/tobna/TaylorShift.

Tobias Christian Nauen, Brian Moser, Federico Raue et al.

Transformers, particularly Vision Transformers (ViTs), have achieved state-of-the-art performance in large-scale image classification. However, they often require large amounts of data and can exhibit biases that limit their robustness and generalizability. This paper introduces ForAug, a novel data augmentation scheme that addresses these challenges and explicitly includes inductive biases, which commonly are part of the neural network architecture, into the training data. ForAug is constructed by using pretrained foundation models to separate and recombine foreground objects with different backgrounds, enabling fine-grained control over image composition during training. It thus increases the data diversity and effective number of training samples. We demonstrate that training on ForNet, the application of ForAug to ImageNet, significantly improves the accuracy of ViTs and other architectures by up to 4.5 percentage points (p.p.) on ImageNet and 7.3 p.p. on downstream tasks. Importantly, ForAug enables novel ways of analyzing model behavior and quantifying biases. Namely, we introduce metrics for background robustness, foreground focus, center bias, and size bias and show that training on ForNet substantially reduces these biases compared to training on ImageNet. In summary, ForAug provides a valuable tool for analyzing and mitigating biases, enabling the development of more robust and reliable computer vision models. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/tobna/ForAug.

Sanath Budakegowdanadoddi Nagaraju, Brian Bernhard Moser, Tobias Christian Nauen et al.

Transformer-based architectures have recently advanced the image reconstruction quality of super-resolution (SR) models. Yet, their scalability remains limited by quadratic attention costs and coarse patch embeddings that weaken pixel-level fidelity. We propose TaylorIR, a plug-and-play framework that enforces 1x1 patch embeddings for true pixel-wise reasoning and replaces conventional self-attention with TaylorShift, a Taylor-series-based attention mechanism enabling full token interactions with near-linear complexity. Across multiple SR benchmarks, TaylorIR delivers state-of-the-art performance while reducing memory consumption by up to 60%, effectively bridging the gap between fine-grained detail restoration and efficient transformer scaling.