dino-perceptual 0.1.3

DINO-based perceptual loss for image reconstruction and generation

DINO Perceptual Loss

A drop-in replacement for LPIPS using DINOv2/v3 features. Achieves comparable perceptual quality to VGG-based LPIPS while using modern self-supervised features—no human perceptual judgments required.

Read the full documentation and benchmarks

Installation

pip install dino-perceptual

Quick Start

import torch
from dino_perceptual import DINOPerceptual

# Initialize loss function (uses DINOv3 by default)
loss_fn = DINOPerceptual(model_size="B").cuda().bfloat16().eval()
loss_fn = torch.compile(loss_fn, fullgraph=True)

# Compute perceptual loss between two images
# Images should be tensors in [-1, 1] range with shape (B, 3, H, W)
loss = loss_fn(predicted, target).mean()

Usage in Autoencoder Training

import torch
import torch.nn as nn
from dino_perceptual import DINOPerceptual

autoencoder = MyAutoencoder().cuda().bfloat16()
perceptual_loss = DINOPerceptual(model_size="B").cuda().bfloat16().eval()
perceptual_loss = torch.compile(perceptual_loss, fullgraph=True)
optimizer = torch.optim.Adam(autoencoder.parameters(), lr=1e-4)

for images in dataloader:
    images = images.cuda().bfloat16()
    reconstructed = autoencoder(images)

    l1_loss = nn.functional.l1_loss(reconstructed, images)
    dino_loss = perceptual_loss(reconstructed, images).mean()

    # DINO weight ~250-1000 works well
    total_loss = l1_loss + 250.0 * dino_loss

    optimizer.zero_grad()
    total_loss.backward()
    optimizer.step()

HuggingFace Authentication

DINOv2/v3 models require accepting the license on HuggingFace:

1. Accept the license at DINOv2 or DINOv3
2. Create a token at https://huggingface.co/settings/tokens
3. Set HF_TOKEN environment variable or run huggingface-cli login

API Reference

DINOPerceptual(
    model_size: str = "B",   # "S", "B", "L", "H", or "G"
    version: str = "v3",     # "v2" or "v3"
    target_size: int = 512,  # Resize images before computing features
    layers: str = "all",     # Which transformer layers to use
)

For feature extraction (e.g., computing FDD):

from dino_perceptual import DINOModel

extractor = DINOModel(model_size="B").cuda().bfloat16().eval()
features, cls_token = extractor(images)  # features: (B, feature_dim)

Computing Frechet DINO Distance (FDD)

FDD works exactly like FID but uses DINO CLS tokens instead of Inception features:

import numpy as np
from scipy import linalg
from dino_perceptual import DINOModel

def compute_fdd(real_features, fake_features):
    """Compute Frechet distance between two feature sets."""
    mu1, sigma1 = real_features.mean(0), np.cov(real_features, rowvar=False)
    mu2, sigma2 = fake_features.mean(0), np.cov(fake_features, rowvar=False)

    diff = mu1 - mu2
    covmean, _ = linalg.sqrtm(sigma1 @ sigma2, disp=False)
    if np.iscomplexobj(covmean):
        covmean = covmean.real

    return diff @ diff + np.trace(sigma1 + sigma2 - 2 * covmean)

# Extract features
extractor = DINOModel(model_size="B").cuda().eval()
with torch.no_grad():
    real_feats, _ = extractor(real_images)      # (N, 768)
    fake_feats, _ = extractor(generated_images)  # (M, 768)

fdd = compute_fdd(real_feats.cpu().numpy(), fake_feats.cpu().numpy())
print(f"FDD: {fdd:.2f}")  # Lower is better (<1 excellent, 1-5 good, >5 poor)

Loss Scaling Guide

The DINO loss magnitude is typically 1e-4 to 1e-2. Scale it to balance with your pixel loss:

Pixel Loss Type	Recommended DINO Weight (α)
L1 / L2	250 - 500
Charbonnier	250 - 1000
+ SSIM loss	250 (SSIM provides structure)

Rule of thumb: Start with α=250, increase to α=1000 for better perceptual quality at the cost of ~1 dB PSNR.

License

MIT

Citation

@software{dino_perceptual,
  title={DINO Perceptual Loss},
  author={Hansen-Estruch, Philippe and Chen, Jiahui and Ramanujan, Vivek and Zohar, Orr and Ping, Yan and Sinha, Animesh and Georgopoulos, Markos and Schoenfeld, Edgar and Hou, Ji and Juefei-Xu, Felix and Vishwanath, Sriram and Thabet, Ali},
  year={2025},
  url={https://github.com/Na-VAE/dino-perceptual}
}