Large-scale pretrained models have proven immensely valuable in handling data-intensive modalities like text and image. However, fine-tuning these models for certain specialized modalities, such as protein sequence and cosmic ray, poses challenges due to the significant modality discrepancy and scarcity of labeled data. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end method, PaRe, to enhance cross-modal fine-tuning, aiming to transfer a large-scale pretrained model to various target modalities. PaRe employs a gating mechanism to select key patches from both source and target data. Through a modality-agnostic Patch Replacement scheme, these patches are preserved and combined to construct data-rich intermediate modalities ranging from easy to hard. By gradually intermediate modality generation, we can not only effectively bridge the modality gap to enhance stability and transferability of cross-modal fine-tuning, but also address the challenge of limited data in the target modality by leveraging enriched intermediate modality data. Compared with hand-designed, general-purpose, task-specific, and state-of-the-art cross-modal fine-tuning approaches, PaRe demonstrates superior performance across three challenging benchmarks, encompassing more than ten modalities.

We launch EVA, a vision-centric foundation model to explore the limits of visual representation at scale using only publicly accessible data. EVA is a vanilla ViT pre-trained to reconstruct the masked out image-text aligned vision features conditioned on visible image patches. Via this pretext task, we can efficiently scale up EVA to one billion parameters, and sets new records on a broad range of representative vision downstream tasks, such as image recognition, video action recognition, object detection, instance segmentation and semantic segmentation without heavy supervised training. Moreover, we observe quantitative changes in scaling EVA result in qualitative changes in transfer learning performance that are not present in other models. For instance, EVA takes a great leap in the challenging large vocabulary instance segmentation task: our model achieves almost the same state-of-the-art performance on LVISv1.0 dataset with over a thousand categories and COCO dataset with only eighty categories. Beyond a pure vision encoder, EVA can also serve as a vision-centric, multi-modal pivot to connect images and text. We find initializing the vision tower of a giant CLIP from EVA can greatly stabilize the training and outperform the training from scratch counterpart with much fewer samples and less compute, providing a new direction for scaling up and accelerating the costly training of multi-modal foundation models. To facilitate future research, we release all the code and models at https://github.com/baaivision/EVA.