A Mixed Diet Makes DINO An Omnivorous Vision Encoder

Abstract

Pre-trained vision encoders like DINOv2 have demonstrated exceptional performance on unimodal tasks. However, we observe that their features are poorly aligned across different visual modalities. For instance, the feature embedding for an RGB image and its corresponding depth map of the same scene exhibit a cosine similarity that is nearly identical to that of two random, unrelated images. To address this, we propose the Omnivorous Vision Encoder, a post-training framework that learns a modality-agnostic feature space. We fine-tune the encoder with a dual objective: first, to maximize the feature alignment between different modalities of the same scene; and second, a distillation objective that anchors the learned representations to a fully frozen teacher. The resulting student encoder becomes "omnivorous" by producing more consistent embeddings for a given scene, regardless of the input modality (RGB, Depth, Segmentation, etc.). This approach enables robust cross-modal understanding while retaining the discriminative semantics of the original foundation model. Omnivorous model weights are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/representations4d.