arXiv Machine Learning

Visual Distribution Anchoring for Efficient Prompt Tuning

arXiv:2607. 28967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompt tuning adapts vision--language models with few trainable parameters, but existing approaches trade off efficiency and adaptation: static textual prompts can overfit source classes, image-conditioned prompts add per-instance computation, and multimodal tuning modifies the visual branch.

arXiv Computer Vision
6d ago

ProCAP: Probabilistic Cross-Attentive Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models

ProCAP introduces a probabilistic cross-attentive prompt learning framework for vision-language models like CLIP, enabling improved cross-modal interaction without updating the backbone. It jointly learns visual and textual prompt tokens, linking them via stacked bidirectional multi-head cross-attention to refine each branch across prompt depth. The method incorporates Gaussian parameterization of prompt tokens, lightweight KL and L2 regularization, and a compact symmetric InfoNCE head to align image features with class-level text representations, achieving strong few-shot base-to-novel performance and competitive transfer results across multiple datasets and benchmarks.

By Hiwa Azeez Abbas, Fatemeh Daneshfar, Moloud Abdar
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Your Model Already Knows Don't Teach It, Learn to Ask It: Soft Prompting for Few-Shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

The paper explores soft prompting for few‑shot object detection with vision‑language models, showing that optimizing a small number of continuous prompt tokens—especially when placed at the cross‑modal boundary and initialized from an empty space token—can match LoRA performance while training far fewer parameters. Soft prompting also avoids catastrophic forgetting, transfers to newer models, and can be verbalized into readable prompts. The study extends these findings to manipulation tasks, indicating that VLMs already contain much of the necessary knowledge for specialized domains, and the main challenge is learning how to ask for it.

By Gautam Rajendrakumar Gare, Siyi Li, Hewei Wang, Cesar Daniel Hernandez, Wei Zhao, Wolfgang M. Pauli, John Galeotti, Deva Ramanan
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Dual-Stream Semantic Guidance with Prototype Anchor Calibration for Source-Fully-Free Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Dual-Stream Semantic Guidance (DSSG), a framework for Source‑Fully‑Free Domain Adaptation of Vision‑Language Models that mitigates dual semantic drift through a caption stream and a class‑anchor stream. It adds a Dynamic Cross‑Modal Knowledge Distillation module and a Prototype Anchor Calibration extension (DSSG‑PAC) to reduce computation while maintaining performance. Experiments show DSSG outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods and DSSG‑PAC cuts adaptation time by 18.9% with minimal loss in accuracy.

By Weiwei Xiang, Shun Peng, Guangyi Xiao, Hao Chen, Lei Yang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 24

ES-VP : Energy-Shaped Dynamic Visual Prompting for Efficient Model Adaptation

ES‑VP introduces Energy‑Shaped Visual Prompting, a method that generates image‑specific prompts through low‑rank initialization and energy‑guided dynamic adaptation. It achieves higher performance than existing single‑prompt and diverse‑prompt approaches while using far fewer parameters. Experiments on five architectures and fifteen datasets show consistent superiority, including a 2.6% accuracy gain over DAM‑VP on CLIP with 590× fewer prompt parameters.

By Can Jin, Ying Li, Jingchen Sun, Hongwu Peng, Jiahui Zhao, Yang Zhou, Lei Li, Dimitris N. Metaxas
arXiv AI
Jun 15

Learning What to Predict: Downstream-Guided Task Design for Continued Pretraining

arXiv:2601. 22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities.

By Shuqi Ke, Giulia Fanti