TAPe+ML: A Compact Structured Representation for Multi-Task Computer Vision

Token-pruning policies are usually designed for a single recognition pipeline, but pretrained Vision Transformers are reused across tasks with different spatial demands. We ask which parts of a pruning policy transfer across image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. For each pipeline, controlled probes freeze the no-pruning checkpoint and apply a series of parameter-free reduction criteria at one eligible layer at a time without retraining. The probes reveal three differences: segmentation and detection rank the criteria differently, classification is especially sensitive to attention-based pruning in the earliest layers, and the dense tasks prefer opposite recovery endpoints. These findings motivate Task-Adaptive Pruning (TAP). Existing register tokens serve as task-agnostic storage for feature artifacts. TAP instead introduces one task register per task and activates only the current one. Its evolving state ranks tokens, distributes an exact removal budget over depth, and sets the recovery scale for dense features. At a final keep rate of $ρ=0.5$, our jointly adapted model, TAP-J, reaches $47.0$ mIoU at $1.30\times$ encoder throughput on ADE20K and $53.7$ box AP at $1.32\times$ encoder throughput on COCO while remaining competitive on ImageNet-1K.

Generalist multitasking vision models aim to unify multiple vision tasks within a single framework, enabling more efficient and versatile learning. However, handling diverse vision tasks -- spanning dense and sparse predictions -- remains challenging due to their inherently varying output structures. In this paper, we propose AHMAD, a simple yet effective framework for generalist multitask learning that integrates different key vision tasks: semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, depth estimation, keypoint detection, and object detection. Our approach incorporates these five tasks into a unified structure: a shared encoder-decoder with several lightweight task-specific projectors. Under the multitask learning paradigm, we observed a complementary performance gain, achieving a state-of-the-art PQ of 53.1 and an mIoU of 66.5 for COCO-val panoptic and semantic segmentation, respectively. Additionally, for top-down keypoint detection, which typically incurs high computational overhead due to multiple forward passes, we introduce a knowledge distillation-based method that enables a single forward pass over the entire image, greatly improving efficiency. Ultimately, our model delivers a lightweight yet effective generalist multitask learning framework, demonstrating strong performance across five vision tasks.

Vision-based perception is fundamental to Space Situational Awareness and autonomous on-orbit operations such as rendezvous, docking, servicing, and navigation. However, progress in this area is limited by the scarcity of annotated space imagery and by challenging visual-domain characteristics including severe illumination changes, low signal-to-noise ratio, and high contrast. We address Stream 1 of the SPARK 2026 Challenge, which requires a single model for spacecraft classification, detection, and fine-grained component segmentation across multiple target types. We propose a compact architecture that integrates a MobileNetV3 encoder with a U-Net-style decoder, combining computational efficiency with accurate dense prediction. Detection is derived analytically from the union of predicted component masks, avoiding a separate bounding-box regression head in the single-spacecraft setting. Our method achieved an overall leaderboard score of 0.9482, with task-specific scores of 1.0000 in classification, 0.9788 in detection, and 0.8917 in segmentation. The proposed approach ranked second overall in the SPARK 2026 Challenge, demonstrating that lightweight encoder-decoder architectures can deliver strong multi-task performance for practical onboard space vision systems.