Evolving Prompt Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Enming, Li, Jiayang, Wu, Yanru, Liu, Zhenyu, Li, Yang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhang, Enming
Li, Jiayang
Wu, Yanru
Liu, Zhenyu
Li, Yang
author_facet Zhang, Enming
Li, Jiayang
Wu, Yanru
Liu, Zhenyu
Li, Yang
contents The adaptation of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks with limited labeled data remains a significant challenge. While parameter-efficient prompt learning methods offer a promising path, they often suffer from catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. Toward addressing this limitation, our work is grounded in the insight that governing the evolutionary path of prompts is essential for forgetting-free adaptation. To this end, we propose EvoPrompt, a novel framework designed to explicitly steer the prompt trajectory for stable, knowledge-preserving fine-tuning. Specifically, our approach employs a Modality-Shared Prompt Projector (MPP) to generate hierarchical prompts from a unified embedding space. Critically, an evolutionary training strategy decouples low-rank updates into directional and magnitude components, preserving early-learned semantic directions while only adapting their magnitude, thus enabling prompts to evolve without discarding foundational knowledge. This process is further stabilized by Feature Geometric Regularization (FGR), which enforces feature decorrelation to prevent representation collapse. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoPrompt achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot learning while robustly preserving the original zero-shot capabilities of pre-trained VLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_09493
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evolving Prompt Adaptation for Vision-Language Models
Zhang, Enming
Li, Jiayang
Wu, Yanru
Liu, Zhenyu
Li, Yang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
The adaptation of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks with limited labeled data remains a significant challenge. While parameter-efficient prompt learning methods offer a promising path, they often suffer from catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. Toward addressing this limitation, our work is grounded in the insight that governing the evolutionary path of prompts is essential for forgetting-free adaptation. To this end, we propose EvoPrompt, a novel framework designed to explicitly steer the prompt trajectory for stable, knowledge-preserving fine-tuning. Specifically, our approach employs a Modality-Shared Prompt Projector (MPP) to generate hierarchical prompts from a unified embedding space. Critically, an evolutionary training strategy decouples low-rank updates into directional and magnitude components, preserving early-learned semantic directions while only adapting their magnitude, thus enabling prompts to evolve without discarding foundational knowledge. This process is further stabilized by Feature Geometric Regularization (FGR), which enforces feature decorrelation to prevent representation collapse. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoPrompt achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot learning while robustly preserving the original zero-shot capabilities of pre-trained VLMs.
title Evolving Prompt Adaptation for Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09493