[Submitted on 2 Sep 2026]
Title:What Does the Encoder Actually Decide? A Controlled Comparison of Vision Backbones on Joint Tree Segmentation and Stereo Depth
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Abstract:A robot pruning trees needs two facts per pixel: whether it belongs to a tree, and its distance. Both are usually obtained via task heads attached to a vision backbone chosen by reputation rather than measurement. Holding dataset, decoders, losses, schedule, and evaluation fixed, we ask: how much does the encoder choice change joint semantic segmentation and stereo depth on thin vegetation? We build a hard parameter-sharing network with one encoder feeding both branches, swapping only the encoder without downstream retuning. We evaluate [N] encoders across [M] architecture families (CNNs, transformers, hybrids, MLP-mixers, state-space models) near a ~25M budget, trained from scratch. Depth is evaluated on tree pixels only; segmentation uses boundary F1 and background IoU to prevent "label-everything-tree" shortcuts. Three findings stand out. First, the strongest encoders are convolutional and hybrid, not transformers: [BestEncoder] leads with [MIoU] segmentation mIoU and [Delta] depth $\delta_1$, while [X] of [Y] plain vision transformers collapse when trained from scratch. Second, parameter count does not predict quality --- [SmallEncoder] at only [P]M parameters outranks models two orders of magnitude larger. Third, segmentation and depth rankings agree strongly (Spearman $\rho$ = [RhoValue]), showing no task conflict. Finally, [K] of [N] encoders collapse to degenerate all-tree segmentation --- exposed by boundary F1 but hidden by region IoU.
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.13232 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2609.13232v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.13232
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Yida Lin [view email] [v1] Wed, 2 Sep 2026 11:21:41 UTC (2,419 KB)
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