PRO-VPT: Distribution-Adaptive Visual Prompt Tuning via Prompt Relocation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shang, Chikai, Li, Mengke, Zhang, Yiqun, Chen, Zhen, Wu, Jinlin, Gu, Fangqing, Lu, Yang, Cheung, Yiu-ming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shang, Chikai
Li, Mengke
Zhang, Yiqun
Chen, Zhen
Wu, Jinlin
Gu, Fangqing
Lu, Yang
Cheung, Yiu-ming
author_facet Shang, Chikai
Li, Mengke
Zhang, Yiqun
Chen, Zhen
Wu, Jinlin
Gu, Fangqing
Lu, Yang
Cheung, Yiu-ming
contents Visual prompt tuning (VPT), i.e., fine-tuning some lightweight prompt tokens, provides an efficient and effective approach for adapting pre-trained models to various downstream tasks. However, most prior art indiscriminately uses a fixed prompt distribution across different tasks, neglecting the importance of each block varying depending on the task. In this paper, we introduce adaptive distribution optimization (ADO) by tackling two key questions: (1) How to appropriately and formally define ADO, and (2) How to design an adaptive distribution strategy guided by this definition? Through empirical analysis, we first confirm that properly adjusting the distribution significantly improves VPT performance, and further uncover a key insight that a nested relationship exists between ADO and VPT. Based on these findings, we propose a new VPT framework, termed PRO-VPT (iterative Prompt RelOcation-based VPT), which adaptively adjusts the distribution built upon a nested optimization formulation. Specifically, we develop a prompt relocation strategy derived from this formulation, comprising two steps: pruning idle prompts from prompt-saturated blocks, followed by allocating these prompts to the most prompt-needed blocks. By iteratively performing prompt relocation and VPT, our proposal can adaptively learn the optimal prompt distribution in a nested optimization-based manner, thereby unlocking the full potential of VPT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal significantly outperforms advanced VPT methods, e.g., PRO-VPT surpasses VPT by 1.6 pp and 2.0 pp average accuracy, leading prompt-based methods to state-of-the-art performance on VTAB-1k and FGVC benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/ckshang/PRO-VPT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_06901
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PRO-VPT: Distribution-Adaptive Visual Prompt Tuning via Prompt Relocation
Shang, Chikai
Li, Mengke
Zhang, Yiqun
Chen, Zhen
Wu, Jinlin
Gu, Fangqing
Lu, Yang
Cheung, Yiu-ming
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Visual prompt tuning (VPT), i.e., fine-tuning some lightweight prompt tokens, provides an efficient and effective approach for adapting pre-trained models to various downstream tasks. However, most prior art indiscriminately uses a fixed prompt distribution across different tasks, neglecting the importance of each block varying depending on the task. In this paper, we introduce adaptive distribution optimization (ADO) by tackling two key questions: (1) How to appropriately and formally define ADO, and (2) How to design an adaptive distribution strategy guided by this definition? Through empirical analysis, we first confirm that properly adjusting the distribution significantly improves VPT performance, and further uncover a key insight that a nested relationship exists between ADO and VPT. Based on these findings, we propose a new VPT framework, termed PRO-VPT (iterative Prompt RelOcation-based VPT), which adaptively adjusts the distribution built upon a nested optimization formulation. Specifically, we develop a prompt relocation strategy derived from this formulation, comprising two steps: pruning idle prompts from prompt-saturated blocks, followed by allocating these prompts to the most prompt-needed blocks. By iteratively performing prompt relocation and VPT, our proposal can adaptively learn the optimal prompt distribution in a nested optimization-based manner, thereby unlocking the full potential of VPT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal significantly outperforms advanced VPT methods, e.g., PRO-VPT surpasses VPT by 1.6 pp and 2.0 pp average accuracy, leading prompt-based methods to state-of-the-art performance on VTAB-1k and FGVC benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/ckshang/PRO-VPT.
title PRO-VPT: Distribution-Adaptive Visual Prompt Tuning via Prompt Relocation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06901