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Franca: Nested Matryoshka Clustering for Scalable Visual Representation Learning

6 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

6 Pith papers citing it
abstract

We present Franca (pronounced Fran-ka): free one; the first fully open-source (data, code, weights) vision foundation model that matches and in many cases surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art proprietary models, e.g., DINOv2, CLIP, SigLIPv2, etc. Our approach is grounded in a transparent training pipeline inspired by Web-SSL and uses publicly available data: ImageNet-21K and a subset of ReLAION-2B. Beyond model release, we tackle critical limitations in SSL clustering methods. While modern models rely on assigning image features to large codebooks via clustering algorithms like Sinkhorn-Knopp, they fail to account for the inherent ambiguity in clustering semantics. To address this, we introduce a parameter-efficient, multi-head clustering projector based on nested Matryoshka representations. This design progressively refines features into increasingly fine-grained clusters without increasing the model size, enabling both performance and memory efficiency. Additionally, we propose a novel positional disentanglement strategy that explicitly removes positional biases from dense representations, thereby improving the encoding of semantic content. This leads to consistent gains on several downstream benchmarks, demonstrating the utility of cleaner feature spaces. Our contributions establish a new standard for transparent, high-performance vision models and open a path toward more reproducible and generalizable foundation models for the broader AI community. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/valeoai/Franca.

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citation-polarity summary

fields

cs.CV 4 cs.LG 2

years

2026 6

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UNVERDICTED 6

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representative citing papers

Coevolving Representations in Joint Image-Feature Diffusion

cs.CV · 2026-04-19 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

CoReDi coevolves semantic representations with the diffusion model via a jointly learned linear projection stabilized by stop-gradient, normalization, and regularization, yielding faster convergence and higher sample quality than fixed-representation baselines.

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Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.