# Decorrelation Speeds Up Vision Transformers Source: [Decorrelation Speeds Up Vision Transformers]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-01-17T05:00:05.253Z Authors: Kieran Carrigg, Rob van Gastel, Melda Yeghaian, Sander Dalm, Faysal Boughorbel, Marcel van Gerven Published: 2025-10-16T13:13:12.000Z ## Abstract Masked Autoencoder (MAE) pre-training of vision transformers (ViTs) yields strong performance in low-label data regimes but comes with substantial computational costs, making it impractical in time- and resource-constrained industrial settings. We address this by integrating Decorrelated Backpropagation (DBP) into MAE pre-training, an optimization method that iteratively reduces input correlations at each layer to accelerate convergence. Applied selectively to the encoder, DBP achieves faster pre-training without loss of stability. To mimic constrained-data scenarios, we evaluate our approach on ImageNet-1K pre-training and ADE20K fine-tuning using randomly sampled subsets of each dataset. Under this setting, DBP-MAE reduces wall-clock time to baseline performance by 21.1%, lowers carbon emissions by 21.4%, and improves segmentation mIoU by 1.1 points. We observe similar gains when pre-training and fine-tuning on proprietary industrial data, confirming the method's applicability in real-world scenarios. These results demonstrate that DBP can reduce training time and energy use while improving downstream performance for large-scale ViT pre-training. Keywords: Deep learning, Vision transformers, Efficient AI, Decorrelation ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()