Learning efficient and expressive visual representation has long been the pursuit of computer vision research. While Vision Transformers (ViTs) gradually replace traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as more scalable vision learners, their applications are plagued by the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. To address the challenge, we introduce a new linear-time sequence modeling method Test-Time Training (TTT) into vision and propose Vision-TTT, which treats visual sequences as datasets and compresses the visual token sequences in a novel self-supervised learning manner. By incorporating the dual-dataset strategy and Conv2d-based dataset preprocessing, Vision-TTT effectively extends vanilla TTT to model 2D visual correlations with global receptive fields. Extensive experiments show that Vittt-T/S/B achieve 77.7%,81.8%,82.7% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet classification and also greatly outperform their counterparts on downstream tasks. At 1280×1280 resolution, Vittt-T reduces FLOPs by 79.4% and runs 4.72× faster with 88.9% less memory than DeiT-T. These results demonstrate the expressiveness and efficiency of Vision-TTT as a strong candidate for the next-generation generic visual backbone.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Performance and efficiency comparison between DeiT [ 53 ] , Vim [ 69 ] and our Vittt model. Results show that Vittt not only achieves superior performance on ImageNet classification and downstream detection and segmentation tasks, but also is more computation and memory efficient in dealing with high-resolution images.
Figure 2: Basics of TTT. The core idea is to update the hidden state W with steps of self-supervised gradient descent and then forward the output to the next layer.
Figure 3: Gradient Magnitude Map (illustrated by Eq. ( 6 )). Vision-TTT employs gradients as the explicit indicators to quantify visual token semantics.
Figure 4: Overall architecture of Vision-TTT. It consists of three stages: Patchification, Vision-TTT Encoder, and Task Adapters to learn representation for vision tasks.
Figure 5: Vittt Block. It evolves from vanilla TTT with the dual dataset strategy and the Conv2d-based dataset preprocessing mechanism for inner self-supervised learning.
Method
size
#P.
FLOPs
Acc.
CNNs
RegNetY-4G
2242
12M
4G
80.0
RegNetY-8G
2242
25M
8G
81.7
RegNetY-16G
2242
45M
16G
82.9
EffNet-B4
3802
19M
4.2G
82.9
EffNet-B5
4562
30M
9.9G
83.6
Table 1: Performance comparison on ImageNet-1K classification. We report the parameters (#P.), FLOPs and Top-1 Accuracy (%) metrics. Left : hierarchical architectures; Right : non-hierarchical architectures.
Method
#Param.
FLOPs
APb
APm
ViT-T
8M
147.1G
41.6
37.9
VRWKV-T
8M
67.9G
41.7
38.0
Vim-T
9M
76.7G
41.8
38.2
ViT 3 -T
8M
69.2G
42.0
38.3
Vittt-T
9M
74.3G
42.9
38.7
ViT-S
28M
344.5G
44.9
40.1
Table 2: Performance comparison on downstream COCO2017 detection ( Left ) and ADE20K segmentation ( Right ) tasks. We report the parameters (#Param.), FLOPs and APb , APm , mIoU metrics, respectively. FLOPs are calculated with 1333×800 resolution for detection and 512×512 resolution for segmentation tasks.
Figure 6: Efficiency comparison between DeiT [ 53 ] , Vim [ 69 ] and our Vittt model. We sketch the FLOPs, throughput, and memory footprint curves for different resolutions ranging from 224×224 (i.e. 196 tokens) to 1280×1280 (i.e. 6400 tokens).
Design Route
#Param.
FLOPs
FPS
Acc.
APb
APm
mIoU
TTT layer
5.87M
1.14G
3607
74.2
40.4
36.8
41.5
+ Share Q / K
5.43M
1.07G
3892
74.0
40.1
36.5
41.2
+ Gating
5.89M
1.15G
3565
75.2
41.2
37.1
42.0
+ Conv1d (vanilla TTT)
5.90M
1.16G
3346
75.6
41.6
37.6
42.6
+ Dual dataset strategy
6.96M
1.42G
2068
77.5
42.7
38.6
44.1
+ Conv2d dataset preprocessing
6.98M
1.44G
2029
77.7
42.9
38.7
44.3
Table 3: Performance comparison for different snapshots on the design route for Vittt-T . Throughput metric FPS (frames per second) is tested with batch size 64.
Method
#Param.
FLOPs
Acc.
APb
APm
mIoU
HeadClassTok
6.98M
1.44G
76.6
41.6
37.8
43.0
MidClassTok
6.98M
1.44G
76.8
41.7
37.9
43.0
DoubleClassTok
6.98M
1.45G
75.4
41.2
37.2
42.5
MaxPool
6.98M
1.44G
77.2
42.2
38.4
43.8
MeanPool
6.98M
1.44G
77.7
42.9
38.7
44.3
Table 4: Performance comparison for different classification strategies on Vittt-T .
Figure 7: Ablation study of (a) mini-batch size b to perform gradient descent along the sequence length T , and (b) number of learnable initial states W0 (indicated by the superscript number 0 1 2 ) for the self-supervised learning of dual datasets.
Figure 8: Comparison of Effective Receptive Field (ERF) [ 38 ] . Pixels with higher intensity indicate larger responses related to the central pixel.
Figure 9: Gradient Magnitude Map of Vittt-T before and after training. Visual tokens with higher intensity indicate steeper gradients (Eq. ( 6 ))and greater importance.
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 10: The Gradient Magnitude Map (GMM) of Vision-TTT, which employs gradient indicator Gt to explicitly quantify token importance. Before training (the first row behind the images), the model attributes almost the same gradient magnitude to each token. After training by supervised class label signal (the second row behind the images), the marked Top-30% tokens clearly show the global semantics of the images.
Figure 11: The self-supervised reconstruction loss (L2 norm) of all the 196 tokens for epoch 0, 3, 300 inside 12 layers of Vittt-T (take the Forth TTT as the example), averaged over 128 images. For epoch 0 before training, the reconstruction loss is fairly equal among all the tokens due to random initialization of the network. During training, we observe that the losses initially rise to a certain level before finally dropping to a lower region. This is because at the very beginning the classification signal dominates the optimization to gain more drastic drop of classification loss. As the training progresses, this effect weakens. At a certain stage (around epoch 20-30), the TTT reconstruction loss starts to take over the leadership and performs deeper adaptation. For epoch 300, the final losses among the 12 layers show different patterns for diverse adaptability. Note that they all stay above zero for non-decaying adaptation across mini-batches.
Modern VLMs and VLA systems commonly adopt off-the-shelf ViTs such as SigLIP2 as visual encoders, but diverse downstream requirements in latency, temporal modeling, and VLM integration often call for customized SOTA-level ViTs. Training such encoders remains beyond the reach of much of the community, as it requires massive image-text data, while standard softmax attention makes high-resolution or dynamic-resolution pretraining prohibitively costly and often forces low-resolution pretraining followed by post-hoc adaptation. TuringViT addresses these challenges with three key designs: Turing Linear Attention (TLA) for efficient sequence modeling, VISTA-Curation to construct supervision-rich image-video training data, and native dynamic-resolution pretraining that supports flexible inputs from the start and transfers seamlessly to downstream VLMs. As a result, TuringViT outperforms leading open-source ViT baselines with only 10% of the data, achieves stronger downstream VLM performance, and delivers substantially better latency scaling on high-resolution inputs. Our scaling-law analysis further shows that TuringViT continues to improve predictably with curated data scale, far from saturation. Its fast adaptation, hardware-friendly design, and efficient deployment have made it a unified visual foundation across XPeng's AI systems. More broadly, TuringViT provides a reproducible pipeline that dramatically lowers the cost for the community to train, customize, and deploy SOTA-level ViTs, moving toward making such Vision Transformers accessible to all.
While prior studies have successfully compressed vision Transformers (ViTs) through various pruning techniques, most have concentrated on width pruning to achieve significant reductions in model size. Depth pruning, which removes entire layers from a ViT, is notoriously difficult for accuracy recovery despite its potential to deliver higher speedups, limiting the acceleration achieved by existing joint width-and-depth pruning methods. In this work, we reveal that the failure of existing depth pruning methods lies in their neglect of heterogeneity between different layers, and we introduce HetDPT, a heterogeneity-aware depth pruning method that avoids dimension mismatch. Comprehensive experiments on ImageNet-1K, CIFAR-100, COCO, and ADE20K validate our method: HetDPT achieves a 1.58× speedup for DeiT-B while maintaining accuracy and a 1.39× speedup for DeiT-S with nearly no accuracy degradation. Furthermore, when combined with width pruning, HetDPT+ sets a new state-of-the-art record in extreme ViT pruning, enhancing the acceleration ratio from 4.24× to 5.19× for the Isomorphic-Pruning-2.6G configuration while maintaining near-lossless accuracy; our code is available at https://github.com/Efficient-AI-for-All/HetDPT.
Zhenfeng Su, Kang Zhao, Han Bao +4
School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China · Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China +1
Pretrained vision foundation models deliver strong performance across tasks with limited fine-tuning. However, their Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones impose high inference costs, limiting deployment on resource-constrained devices. In this work, we accelerate large-scale pretrained ViTs while preserving their feature extraction capabilities by exploiting the intrinsic convolution-like behavior of some attention heads. Specifically, we introduce an efficient depthwise convolution-based layer that serves as a drop-in replacement for these heads. Additionally, we propose simple strategies to identify which heads can be replaced and introduce a fine-tuning procedure that recovers downstream task performance. Across both image classification and segmentation tasks, our method achieves 17-20% percent inference speedup with minimal performance degradation. We validate the approach through detailed derivations, extensive experiments, and efficiency benchmarks. The reference implementation is publicly available.
Carmelo Scribano, Mohammad Mahdi, Nedyalko Prisadnikov +5
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy. · INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria