Chain-of-Models Pre-Training: Rethinking Training Acceleration of Vision Foundation Models

arXiv:2604.12391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we present Chain-of-Models Pre-Training (CoM-PT), a novel performance-lossless training acceleration method for vision foundation models (VFMs). This approach fundamentally differs from existing acceleration methods in its core motivation: rather than optimizing each model individually, CoM-PT is designed to accelerate the training pipeline at the model family level, scaling efficiently as the model family expands. Specifically, Co