# PAD: Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Patchwise-Scale Adapter for Infrared Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08192 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08192/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17564/) (2023)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [SatMAE: Pre-training Transformers for Temporal and Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08051/) (2022)
- [MultiMAE: Multi-modal Multi-task Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01678/) (2022)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02437/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Snuffy: Efficient Whole Slide Image Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08258/) (2024)
- [UNIP: Rethinking Pre-trained Attention Patterns for Infrared Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02257/) (2025)
- [UNIV: Unified Foundation Model for Infrared and Visible Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15642/) (2025)
- [Skeleton-to-Image Encoding: Enabling Skeleton Representation Learning via Vision-Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05963/) (2026)
- [SpectraDINO: Modality-Conditioned Adaptation of RGB Vision Foundation Models Across Infrared Bands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02258/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for RGB images has achieved significant success, yet there is still limited research on SSL for infrared images, primarily due to three prominent challenges: 1) the lack of a suitable large-scale infrared pre-training dataset, 2) the distinctiveness of non-iconic infrared images rendering common pre-training tasks like masked image modeling (MIM) less effective, and 3) the scarcity of fine-grained textures making it particularly challenging to learn general image features. To address these issues, we construct a Multi-Scene Infrared Pre-training (MSIP) dataset comprising 178,756 images, and introduce object-sensitive random RoI cropping, an image preprocessing method, to tackle the challenge posed by non-iconic images. To alleviate the impact of weak textures on feature learning, we propose a pre-training paradigm called Pre-training with ADapter (PAD), which uses adapters to learn domain-specific features while freezing parameters pre-trained on ImageNet to retain the general feature extraction capability. This new paradigm is applicable to any transformer-based SSL method. Furthermore, to achieve more flexible coordination between pre-trained and newly-learned features in different layers and patches, a patchwise-scale adapter with dynamically learnable scale factors is introduced. Extensive experiments on three downstream tasks show that PAD, with only 1.23M pre-trainable parameters, outperforms other baseline paradigms including continual full pre-training on MSIP. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/casiatao/PAD.