Revisiting Multi-Task Visual Representation Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13886v1
• Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:59:19 GMT
• Title: Revisiting Multi-Task Visual Representation Learning
• Authors: Shangzhe Di, Zhonghua Zhai, Weidi Xie,
• Abstract summary: We introduce MTV, a principled multi-task visual pretraining framework.<n>We leverage high-capacity "expert" models to synthesize dense, structured pseudo-labels at scale.<n>Our results demonstrate that MTV achieves "best-of-both-worlds" performance.
• Score: 52.93947931352643
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Current visual representation learning remains bifurcated: vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) excel at global semantic alignment but lack spatial precision, while self-supervised methods (e.g., MAE, DINO) capture intricate local structures yet struggle with high-level semantic context. We argue that these paradigms are fundamentally complementary and can be integrated into a principled multi-task framework, further enhanced by dense spatial supervision. We introduce MTV, a multi-task visual pretraining framework that jointly optimizes a shared backbone across vision-language contrastive, self-supervised, and dense spatial objectives. To mitigate the need for manual annotations, we leverage high-capacity "expert" models -- such as Depth Anything V2 and OWLv2 -- to synthesize dense, structured pseudo-labels at scale. Beyond the framework, we provide a systematic investigation into the mechanics of multi-task visual learning, analyzing: (i) the marginal gain of each objective, (ii) task synergies versus interference, and (iii) scaling behavior across varying data and model scales. Our results demonstrate that MTV achieves "best-of-both-worlds" performance, significantly enhancing fine-grained spatial reasoning without compromising global semantic understanding. Our findings suggest that multi-task learning, fueled by high-quality pseudo-supervision, is a scalable path toward more general visual encoders.

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