The Domain Is a Residue: Adapting Self-Supervised Features, Not Generators

Abstract:Clearing fog, rain or snow from footage, or turning renders into photographs, must remove the source domain and keep the scene. Unpaired translators carry it through because their generator sees the source appearance (pixels, a near-invertible latent or a control map) and keeps it. A DINO feature map fixes what is in the scene and carries weather, lighting and rendering style as a residue of 13 to 14% of the feature norm. We propose the Representation Feature Adapter (RFA), a 2.9M-parameter network that moves this residue. We train only the adapter and its discriminators; the encoder and a feature-conditioned decoder, trained once for all conditions, stay frozen. Against CycleGAN-Turbo it is ahead on both metrics on fog and on KID on night, and level within noise on snow, rain and haze. On sim-to-real it leads REGEN and HyPER-GAN on both metrics. Only the RFA removes the rain while keeping the scene. The removal costs scene structure: CycleGAN-Turbo keeps more on every condition but fog. On VAE latents the identical adapter collapses to the identity, and decoders from other groups that never saw it render its output. The RFA has about 160 times fewer trainable parameters than CycleGAN-Turbo and under a fifth of its per-condition training time.

9 pages main text, 28 pages including appendix. 12 figures, 13 tables

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Graphics (cs.GR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

I.2.10; I.4.3; I.4.8

arXiv:2609.37330 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.37330v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.37330 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.