GenHancer: Imperfect Generative Models are Secretly Strong
  Vision-Centric Enhancers
Authors: name: Shijie Ma; name: Yuying Ge; name: Teng Wang; name: Yuxin Guo; name: Yixiao Ge; name: Ying Shan
Published: 2025-03-25 09:15:34

Abstract: The synergy between generative and discriminative models receives growing
attention. While discriminative Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP)
excels in high-level semantics, it struggles with perceiving fine-grained
visual details. Generally, to enhance representations, generative models take
CLIP's visual features as conditions for reconstruction. However, the
underlying principle remains underexplored. In this work, we empirically found
that visually perfect generations are not always optimal for representation
enhancement. The essence lies in effectively extracting fine-grained knowledge
from generative models while mitigating irrelevant information. To explore
critical factors, we delve into three aspects: (1) Conditioning mechanisms: We
found that even a small number of local tokens can drastically reduce the
difficulty of reconstruction, leading to collapsed training. We thus conclude
that utilizing only global visual tokens as conditions is the most effective
strategy. (2) Denoising configurations: We observed that end-to-end training
introduces extraneous information. To address this, we propose a two-stage
training strategy to prioritize learning useful visual knowledge. Additionally,
we demonstrate that lightweight denoisers can yield remarkable improvements.
(3) Generation paradigms: We explore both continuous and discrete denoisers
with desirable outcomes, validating the versatility of our method. Through our
in-depth explorations, we have finally arrived at an effective method, namely
GenHancer, which consistently outperforms prior arts on the MMVP-VLM benchmark,
e.g., 6.0% on OpenAICLIP. The enhanced CLIP can be further plugged into
multimodal large language models for better vision-centric performance. All the
models and codes are made publicly available.