# Agglomerating Large Vision Encoders via Distillation for VFSS Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02351 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02351/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00989/) (2023)
- [TinyViT: Fast Pretraining Distillation for Small Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10666/) (2022)
- [EfficientSAM: Leveraged Masked Image Pretraining for Efficient Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00863/) (2023)
- [AM-RADIO: Agglomerative Vision Foundation Model -- Reduce All Domains Into One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06709/) (2023)
- [Eagle: Exploring The Design Space for Multimodal LLMs with Mixture of Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15998/) (2024)
- [Exploring scalable medical image encoders beyond text supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10815/) (2024)
- [SAM-CLIP: Merging Vision Foundation Models towards Semantic and Spatial Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15308/) (2023)
- [RADIOv2.5: Improved Baselines for Agglomerative Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07679/) (2024)
- [Morphological Prototyping for Unsupervised Slide Representation Learning in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11643/) (2024)
- [Theia: Distilling Diverse Vision Foundation Models for Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20179/) (2024)
- [MobileSAMv2: Faster Segment Anything to Everything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09579/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything in Medical Images and Videos: Benchmark and Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03322/) (2024)
- [EdgeSAM: Prompt-In-the-Loop Distillation for SAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06660/) (2023)
- [An X-Ray Is Worth 15 Features: Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03334/) (2024)
- [PHI-S: Distribution Balancing for Label-Free Multi-Teacher Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01680/) (2024)
- [RepViT-SAM: Towards Real-Time Segmenting Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05760/) (2023)
- [MTKD: Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09571/) (2024)
- [Video-TransUNet: Temporally Blended Vision Transformer for CT VFSS Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08315/) (2022)
- [Video-SwinUNet: Spatio-temporal Deep Learning Framework for VFSS Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11325/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [EfficientSAM3: Progressive Hierarchical Distillation for Video Concept Segmentation from SAM1, 2, and 3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15833/) (2025)
- [Rank-Aware Agglomeration of Foundation Models for Immunohistochemistry Image Cell Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12588/) (2025)
- [GRAFT: Growing Agglomerative Foundation Models via Continual Teacher Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02597/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The deployment of foundation models for medical imaging has demonstrated considerable success. However, their training overheads associated with downstream tasks remain substantial due to the size of the image encoders employed, and the inference complexity is also significantly high. Although lightweight variants have been obtained for these foundation models, their performance is constrained by their limited model capacity and suboptimal training strategies. In order to achieve an improved tradeoff between complexity and performance, we propose a new framework to improve the performance of low complexity models via knowledge distillation from multiple large medical foundation models (e.g., MedSAM, RAD-DINO, MedCLIP), each specializing in different vision tasks, with the goal to effectively bridge the performance gap for medical image segmentation tasks. The agglomerated model demonstrates superior generalization across 12 segmentation tasks, whereas specialized models require explicit training for each task. Our approach achieved an average performance gain of 2% in Dice coefficient compared to simple distillation.