DeAR: Fine-Grained VLM Adaptation by Decomposing Attention Head Roles
Fuente:
arXiv
Guardado en:
| Autores principales: | , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2026
|
| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | |
| Etiquetas: |
Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
|
| _version_ | 1866915841698693120 |
|---|---|
| author | Ma, Yiming Yang, Hongkun Wang, Lionel Z. Chen, Bin Xian, Weizhi Teng, Jianzhi |
| author_facet | Ma, Yiming Yang, Hongkun Wang, Lionel Z. Chen, Bin Xian, Weizhi Teng, Jianzhi |
| contents | Prompt learning is a dominant paradigm for adapting pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. However, existing methods often rely on a simplistic, layer-centric view, assuming shallow layers capture general features while deep layers handle task-specific knowledge. This assumption results in uncontrolled interactions between learnable tokens and original tokens. Task-specific knowledge could degrades the model's core generalization and creates a trade-off between task adaptation and the preservation of zero-shot generalization. To address this, we challenge the layer-centric view and propose \textbf{DeAR}, a framework that achieves fine-grained VLM adaptation by \textbf{De}composing \textbf{A}ttention head \textbf{R}oles. We posit that the functional specialization within VLMs occurs not between layers, but at the finer-grained level of individual attention heads in the deeper layers. Based on this insight, we introduce a novel metric, Concept Entropy, to systematically classify attention heads into distinct functional roles: \textit{Attribute}, \textit{Generalization}, and \textit{Mixed}. Guided by these roles, we introduce specialized attribute tokens and a Role-Based Attention Mask mechanism to precisely control information flow, ensuring generalization heads remain isolated from task-specific knowledge. We further incorporate a Task-Adaptive Fusion Strategy for inference. Extensive experiments on fifteen datasets show that DeAR achieves a strong balance between task adaptation and generalization, outperforming previous methods across various tasks. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_01111 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | DeAR: Fine-Grained VLM Adaptation by Decomposing Attention Head Roles Ma, Yiming Yang, Hongkun Wang, Lionel Z. Chen, Bin Xian, Weizhi Teng, Jianzhi Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Prompt learning is a dominant paradigm for adapting pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. However, existing methods often rely on a simplistic, layer-centric view, assuming shallow layers capture general features while deep layers handle task-specific knowledge. This assumption results in uncontrolled interactions between learnable tokens and original tokens. Task-specific knowledge could degrades the model's core generalization and creates a trade-off between task adaptation and the preservation of zero-shot generalization. To address this, we challenge the layer-centric view and propose \textbf{DeAR}, a framework that achieves fine-grained VLM adaptation by \textbf{De}composing \textbf{A}ttention head \textbf{R}oles. We posit that the functional specialization within VLMs occurs not between layers, but at the finer-grained level of individual attention heads in the deeper layers. Based on this insight, we introduce a novel metric, Concept Entropy, to systematically classify attention heads into distinct functional roles: \textit{Attribute}, \textit{Generalization}, and \textit{Mixed}. Guided by these roles, we introduce specialized attribute tokens and a Role-Based Attention Mask mechanism to precisely control information flow, ensuring generalization heads remain isolated from task-specific knowledge. We further incorporate a Task-Adaptive Fusion Strategy for inference. Extensive experiments on fifteen datasets show that DeAR achieves a strong balance between task adaptation and generalization, outperforming previous methods across various tasks. |
| title | DeAR: Fine-Grained VLM Adaptation by Decomposing Attention Head Roles |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01111 |