# DARES: Depth Anything in Robotic Endoscopic Surgery with Self-supervised Vector-LoRA of the Foundation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.17433 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17433/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Study of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08747/) (2023)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [GaLore: Memory-Efficient LLM Training by Gradient Low-Rank Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03507/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth and Ego-motion Learning from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10553/) (2019)
- [Stereo Correspondence and Reconstruction of Endoscopic Data Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01133/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth and Ego-Motion Estimation in Endoscopy: Appearance Flow to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08122/) (2021)
- [DeFeat-Net: General Monocular Depth via Simultaneous Unsupervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13446/) (2020)
- [Surgical-DINO: Adapter Learning of Foundation Models for Depth Estimation in Endoscopic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06013/) (2024)
- [MoRA: High-Rank Updating for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12130/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Endo-FASt3r: Endoscopic Foundation model Adaptation for Structure from motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07204/) (2025)
- [ColonAdapter: Geometry Estimation Through Foundation Model Adaptation for Colonoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22250/) (2025)
- [RealSynCol: a high-fidelity synthetic colon dataset for 3D reconstruction applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08397/) (2026)
- [Endoscopic Depth Estimation Based on Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20881/) (2025)
- [EndoGMDE: Generalizable Monocular Depth Estimation with Mixture of Low-Rank Experts for Diverse Endoscopic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01206/) (2025)
- [EndoSfM3D: Learning to 3D Reconstruct Any Endoscopic Surgery Scene using Self-supervised Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22359/) (2025)
- [Spectral Rectification for Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Foundation Models in Colonoscopy Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15374/) (2026)
- [Geometry-Aware Camera Localization for Bronchoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07116/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) relies on accurate depth estimation for 3D reconstruction and visualization. While foundation models like Depth Anything Models (DAM) show promise, directly applying them to surgery often yields suboptimal results. Fully fine-tuning on limited surgical data can cause overfitting and catastrophic forgetting, compromising model robustness and generalization. Although Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) addresses some adaptation issues, its uniform parameter distribution neglects the inherent feature hierarchy, where earlier layers, learning more general features, require more parameters than later ones. To tackle this issue, we introduce Depth Anything in Robotic Endoscopic Surgery (DARES), a novel approach that employs a new adaptation technique, Vector Low-Rank Adaptation (Vector-LoRA) on the DAM V2 to perform self-supervised monocular depth estimation in RAS scenes. To enhance learning efficiency, we introduce Vector-LoRA by integrating more parameters in earlier layers and gradually decreasing parameters in later layers. We also design a reprojection loss based on the multi-scale SSIM error to enhance depth perception by better tailoring the foundation model to the specific requirements of the surgical environment. The proposed method is validated on the SCARED dataset and demonstrates superior performance over recent state-of-the-art self-supervised monocular depth estimation techniques, achieving an improvement of 13.3% in the absolute relative error metric. The code and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/mobarakol/DARES.