# Learning from Offline Foundation Features with Tensor Augmentations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02527 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02527/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06174/) (2016)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Do Better ImageNet Models Transfer Better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08974/) (2018)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection: A Challenge at the 2017 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05006/) (2017)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05167/) (2016)
- [Pre-Trained Models: Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07139/) (2021)
- [Scaling & Shifting Your Features: A New Baseline for Efficient Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08823/) (2022)
- [TrivialAugment: Tuning-free Yet State-of-the-Art Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10158/) (2021)
- [BCN20000: Dermoscopic Lesions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02288/) (2019)
- [Dataset Augmentation in Feature Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05538/) (2017)
- [Image Data Augmentation for Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08610/) (2022)
- [Dual PatchNorm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01327/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [APLA: A Simple Adaptation Method for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11335/) (2025)
- [Towards Large Model Feature Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24025/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Learning from Offline Foundation Features with Tensor Augmentations (LOFF-TA), an efficient training scheme designed to harness the capabilities of foundation models in limited resource settings where their direct development is not feasible. LOFF-TA involves training a compact classifier on cached feature embeddings from a frozen foundation model, resulting in up to 37× faster training and up to 26× reduced GPU memory usage. Because the embeddings of augmented images would be too numerous to store, yet the augmentation process is essential for training, we propose to apply tensor augmentations to the cached embeddings of the original non-augmented images. LOFF-TA makes it possible to leverage the power of foundation models, regardless of their size, in settings with limited computational capacity. Moreover, LOFF-TA can be used to apply foundation models to high-resolution images without increasing compute. In certain scenarios, we find that training with LOFF-TA yields better results than directly fine-tuning the foundation model.