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Structure-Induced Gradient Regulation for Generalizable Vision-Language Models

delete2025-09-01
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PRE
AI
李俊成 (Juncheng Li)
汤斯亮 (Siliang Tang)
L
Longhui Wei
J
Jun Xiao
F
Fei Wu
R
Richang Hong
王萌 (Meng Wang)
Q
Qi Tian
DOI:10.1109/TPAMI.2025.3604454delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Prompt tuning, a recently emerging paradigm, adapts vision-language pre-trained models to new tasks efficiently by learning “soft prompts” for frozen models. However, in few-shot scenarios, its effectiveness is limited by sensitivity to the initialization and the time-consuming search for optimal initialization, hindering rapid adaptation. Additionally, prompt tuning risks reducing the models’ generalizability due to overfitting on scarce training samples. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel Gradient-RegulAted Meta-prompt learning (GRAM) framework that jointly meta-learns an efficient soft prompt initialization for better adaptation and a lightweight gradient regulating function for strong cross-domain generalizability in a meta-learning paradigm using only the weakly labeled image-text pre-training data. This is achieved through a Cross-Modal Hierarchical Clustering algorithm that organizes extensive image-text data into a structured hierarchy, facilitating robust meta-learning across diverse domains. Rather than designing a specific prompt tuning method, our GRAM can be easily incorporated into various prompt tuning methods in a model-agnostic way and bring about consistent improvement for them. Further, we consider a more practical but challenging setting: test-time prompt tuning with only unlabeled test samples and propose an improved structure-induced gradient regulating function to leverage the structured semantics of the meta-learning data for zero-shot generalization. This novel approach exploits the hierarchically clustered meta-learning data to model relationships between test-time data and meta-learning prototypes, facilitating the transfer of invariant knowledge without explicit annotations. Meanwhile, we introduce a structure complexity-informed strategy for adaptively constructing meta-training tasks and generating prototypes, which fully considers the diverse semantics within hierarchical clusters of different complexities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art few- and zero-shot generalizability of our method.
Keywords:
Meta-prompt learning
structure-induced gradient regulation
vision-language pre-training models

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence cover
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
IF:
18.6
Papers:
831
Citations:
9.8W

Organization

H
huawei, shanghai, china
Scholars:
2
Papers: 1
Citations: 0
H
hefei university of technology
Scholars:
2.5W
Papers: 1.7W
Citations: 35
Z
zhejiang university
Scholars:
17.6W
Papers: 12.1W
Citations: 152
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