Cross-architecture universal feature coding via distribution alignment

Abstract

Feature coding has become increasingly important in scenarios where semantic representations rather than raw pixels are transmitted and stored. However, most existing methods are architecture-specific, targeting either CNNs or Transformers. This design limits their applicability in real-world scenarios where features from both architectures coexist. To address this gap, we introduce a new research problem: cross-architecture universal feature coding (CAUFC), which seeks to build a unified codec that can effectively compress features from heterogeneous architectures. To tackle this challenge, we propose a two-step distribution alignment method. First, we design the format alignment method that unifies CNN and Transformer features into a consistent 2D token format. Second, we propose the feature value alignment method that harmonizes statistical distributions via truncation and normalization. As a first attempt to study CAUFC, we evaluate our method on the image classification task. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior rate-accuracy trade-offs compared to the architecture-specific baseline. This work marks an initial step toward universal feature compression across heterogeneous model architectures.