arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 7

Rethinking Fine-Tuning: Unlocking Hidden Capabilities in Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Mask Fine‑Tuning (MFT), a new approach for adapting Vision‑Language Models that avoids modifying backbone weights. MFT learns masks to selectively route information through existing pretrained connections, dynamically uncovering subnetworks that better align with downstream tasks. Experiments demonstrate that MFT consistently outperforms both Full Fine‑Tuning and Parameter‑Efficient Fine‑Tuning across multiple benchmarks, while also offering insights into how pretrained VLMs reorganize their internal pathways during adaptation.

By Mingyuan Zhang, Yue Bai, Yifan Wang, Yiyang Huang, Yun Fu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

SIMPLER: Efficient Foundation Model Adaptation via Similarity-Guided Layer Pruning for Earth Observation

SIMPLER is a pre‑fine‑tuning method that reduces inference and deployment costs for Earth Observation foundation models by pruning redundant layers. It uses layer‑wise representation similarity on unlabeled task data to identify and remove up to 79% of parameters without requiring gradients, magnitude heuristics, or hyperparameter tuning. Experiments on Prithvi‑EO‑2, TerraMind, and ImageNet‑pretrained ViT‑MAE show that SIMPLER retains 94% of baseline performance while achieving 2.1× faster training and 2.6× faster inference.

By V\'ictor Barreiro, Johannes Jakubik, Francisco Arg\"uello, Dora B. Heras