Forging Tokens for Improved Storage-efficient Training

Recent advancements in Deep Neural Network (DNN) models have significantly improved performance across computer vision tasks. However, achieving highly generalizable and high-performing vision models requires extensive datasets, leading to large storage requirements. This storage challenge poses a critical bottleneck for scaling up vision models. Motivated by the success of discrete representations, SeiT proposes to use Vector-Quantized (VQ) feature vectors (i.e., tokens) as network inputs for vision classification. However, applying traditional data augmentations to tokens faces challenges due to input domain shift. To address this issue, we introduce TokenAdapt and ColorAdapt, simple yet effective token-based augmentation strategies. TokenAdapt realigns token embedding space for compatibility with spatial augmentations, preserving the model's efficiency without requiring fine-tuning. Additionally, ColorAdapt addresses color-based augmentations for tokens inspired by Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN). We evaluate our approach across various scenarios, including storage-efficient ImageNet-1k classification, fine-grained classification, robustness benchmarks, and ADE-20k semantic segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate consistent performance improvement in diverse experiments. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/tokenadapt.