# Vanishing Depth: Training Generalized Depth Adapters with Sinusoidal Depth Preprocessing for Pretrained RGB Encoders

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19947 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19947/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 76 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

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- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
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- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalized metric depth understanding is critical for precise vision-guided robotics, which current state-of-the-art (SOTA) vision-encoders do not support. To address this, we propose a self-supervised training approach that extends pretrained RGB encoders with a depth adapter to incorporate and align metric depth into a combined latent space without interfering with the pretrained RGB feature extraction. In combination with our sinusoidal depth encoding, the depth adapter enables generalized and robust depth density and distribution invariant feature extraction. Our depth adapters improve a wide set of generalized RGB baselines across a spectrum of relevant RGBD downstream tasks in segmentation, pose estimation, and depth completion -- without the necessity of finetuning. Most importantly, we achieve 56.05 mIoU in the SUN-RGBD segmentation, while outperforming SOTA depth-aware and multi-modal encoders in our experiments. When no depth is present, one can activate our depth adapter with an empty map, use single pixel depth clues, or monocular depth estimation to include the depth aware feature extraction into subsequent downstream tasks.