press releases | 27/11/2025

Randomized-MLP Regularization Improves Domain Adaptation and Interpretability in DINOv2

Joel Valdivia Ortega · Lorenz Lamm · Franziska Eckardt · Benedikt Schworm · Marion Jasnin · Tingying Peng

Vision TraK (ViTs), such as DINOv2, achieve strong performance

across domains but often repurpose low-informative patch tokens in ways

that reduce the interpretability of attention and feature maps. This

challenge is especially evident in medical imaging, where domain shifts

can degrade both performance and transparency. In this paper, we

introduce Randomized-MLP (RMLP) regularization, a contrastive

learning-based method that encourages more semantically aligned

representations. We apply RMLP when fine-tuning DINOv2 to both medical

and natural image modalities, showing that it improves or maintains

downstream performance while producing more interpretable attention

maps. We also provide a mathematical analysis of RMLPs, offering

insights into its role in enhancing ViT-based models and advancing our

understanding of contrastive learning in this context.

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