Inference-Path Optimization via Circuit Duplication in Frozen Visual Transformers for Marine Species Classification

arXiv:2604.03428v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated underwater species classification is constrained by annotation cost and environmental variation that limits the transferability of fully supervised models. Recent work has shown that frozen embeddings from self-supervised vision foundation models already provide a strong label-efficient baseline for marine image classification. Here we investigate whether this frozen-embedding regime can be improved at inference time, without fine-tuning or changing model weights. We apply Circuit Duplication, an inference-time method originally proposed for Large Language Models, in which a selected range of transformer layers is traversed twice during the forward pass. We evaluate on the class-imbalanced AQUA20 benchmark using frozen DINOv3 embeddings under two settings: global circuit selection, where a single duplicated circuit is chosen for the full dataset, and class-specific circuit selection, where each species may receive a different optimal circuit. Both settings use simple semi-supervised downstream classifiers. Circuit Duplication consistently improves over the standard frozen forward pass. At the maximum label budget, class-specific selection reaches a macro F1 of 0.875, closing the gap to the fully supervised ConvNeXt benchmark (0.889) to 1.4 points without any gradient-based training. Four species exceed their fully supervised reference, with octopus improving by +12.1 F1 points. Across all budgets, roughly 75% of classes prefer a class-specific circuit, indicating a genuinely class-dependent benefit. To our knowledge, this is the first application of Circuit Duplication to computer vision.