Carve VFM: Carving Specialists out of Generalists, Automatic Task-Specific Compression of Vision Foundation Models

Vision foundation models (VFMs) provide transferable visual representations, but their inference cost limits deployment in many settings. Fine-tuning specializes a VFM without shrinking it; distillation shrinks it, but through expensive teacher-guided training. Structured pruning offers a more direct route by extracting a compact subnetwork from the VFM. However, as compression gets aggressive, existing methods fail because they treat subnetwork selection and recovery as separate axes. Across layers, capacity must follow task sensitivity rather than spread uniformly. Within a layer, a removal cannot be judged by importance alone; its impact also depends on how well the lost contribution can be recovered from what remains. Selection and recovery must therefore be decided jointly. We introduce Carve VFM, which resolves this interdependence. Given a VFM, a calibration set, and a parameter budget, it (i) searches for task-specific capacity allocations across layers; (ii) guides the search via an adaptive recovery-aware fitness criterion; and (iii) reconstructs removed behavior through iterative closed-form low-rank corrections merged into the surviving weights. The result is a dense encoder produced in minutes on a single GPU without backbone retraining. Across twelve benchmarks and four models from DINOv3 and MetaCLIP-2, Carve VFM achieves the highest reported mean accuracy in seven of eight backbone-budget configurations among the evaluated dense structured-pruning methods. Further fine-tuning surpasses the strongest evaluated edge model (88.1% vs. 85.8%), and carved models cut compute and memory while delivering 1.3-2.0x higher GPU throughput than the uncompressed one. These results show that the compact model you need is inside the VFM; it only has to be carved out.