Decouple before Align: Visual Disentanglement Enhances Prompt Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Fei, Zhou, Tianfei, Yao, Jiangchao, Zhang, Ya, Tsang, Ivor W., Wang, Yanfeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Fei
Zhou, Tianfei
Yao, Jiangchao
Zhang, Ya
Tsang, Ivor W.
Wang, Yanfeng
author_facet Zhang, Fei
Zhou, Tianfei
Yao, Jiangchao
Zhang, Ya
Tsang, Ivor W.
Wang, Yanfeng
contents Prompt tuning (PT), as an emerging resource-efficient fine-tuning paradigm, has showcased remarkable effectiveness in improving the task-specific transferability of vision-language models. This paper delves into a previously overlooked information asymmetry issue in PT, where the visual modality mostly conveys more context than the object-oriented textual modality. Correspondingly, coarsely aligning these two modalities could result in the biased attention, driving the model to merely focus on the context area. To address this, we propose DAPT, an effective PT framework based on an intuitive decouple-before-align concept. First, we propose to explicitly decouple the visual modality into the foreground and background representation via exploiting coarse-and-fine visual segmenting cues, and then both of these decoupled patterns are aligned with the original foreground texts and the hand-crafted background classes, thereby symmetrically strengthening the modal alignment. To further enhance the visual concentration, we propose a visual pull-push regularization tailored for the foreground-background patterns, directing the original visual representation towards unbiased attention on the region-of-interest object. We demonstrate the power of architecture-free DAPT through few-shot learning, base-to-novel generalization, and data-efficient learning, all of which yield superior performance across prevailing benchmarks. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Ferenas/DAPT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_00395
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decouple before Align: Visual Disentanglement Enhances Prompt Tuning
Zhang, Fei
Zhou, Tianfei
Yao, Jiangchao
Zhang, Ya
Tsang, Ivor W.
Wang, Yanfeng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Prompt tuning (PT), as an emerging resource-efficient fine-tuning paradigm, has showcased remarkable effectiveness in improving the task-specific transferability of vision-language models. This paper delves into a previously overlooked information asymmetry issue in PT, where the visual modality mostly conveys more context than the object-oriented textual modality. Correspondingly, coarsely aligning these two modalities could result in the biased attention, driving the model to merely focus on the context area. To address this, we propose DAPT, an effective PT framework based on an intuitive decouple-before-align concept. First, we propose to explicitly decouple the visual modality into the foreground and background representation via exploiting coarse-and-fine visual segmenting cues, and then both of these decoupled patterns are aligned with the original foreground texts and the hand-crafted background classes, thereby symmetrically strengthening the modal alignment. To further enhance the visual concentration, we propose a visual pull-push regularization tailored for the foreground-background patterns, directing the original visual representation towards unbiased attention on the region-of-interest object. We demonstrate the power of architecture-free DAPT through few-shot learning, base-to-novel generalization, and data-efficient learning, all of which yield superior performance across prevailing benchmarks. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Ferenas/DAPT.
title Decouple before Align: Visual Disentanglement Enhances Prompt Tuning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00395