Unlocking the Potential of Vision Foundation Models for Multi-Task Dense Prediction via Mixture of Task Adapters

Abstract

Multi-task dense prediction seeks a single, coherent representation that supports simultaneously discriminative semantic recognition and regularized geometric/structural inference. For vision foundation models, pretrained semantic invariances conflict with the frequency and smoothness biases of dense objectives; joint fine-tuning and single-route adapters therefore compress competing gradients into one update channel, causing negative transfer and unstable cross-task agreement. We frame this as two-level adaptation: task-generic alignment that preserves priors, and task-aware specialization that resolves late-stage conflicts. Based on this principle, we propose D2MoE , a Mixture of Task Adapters that explicitly factorizes these roles within a frozen DINOv3 backbone. D2MoE introduces Task-Generic Low-Rank Adaptation (TG-LoRA) in attention projections throughout the network to provide a stable, shared adaptation channel, and a Task-Adaptive Mixture of Experts (TA-MoE) injected only at the final attention block of each stage to enact sparse, task-conditioned perturbations of token mixing in a single forward pass. A Semantic Prior Injector further couples multi-level task features with frozen foundation priors to reinforce semantic coherence while preserving boundary and structural fidelity. Experiments across diverse benchmarks substantiate that this structured factorization yields robust multi-task improvements with a small trainable footprint, establishing a principled and scalable route to prior-preserving, foundation-centric multi-task dense perception.