AdaViPro: Region-Based Adaptive Visual Prompt For Large-Scale Models Adapting

Recently, prompt-based methods have emerged as a new alternative ‘parameter-efficient fine-tuning’ paradigm, which only fine-tunes a small number of additional parameters while keeping the original model frozen. However, despite achieving notable results, existing prompt methods mainly focus on ‘what to add’, while overlooking the equally important aspect of ‘where to add’, typically relying on the manually crafted placement. To this end, we propose a region-based Adaptive Visual Prompt, named AdaViPro, which integrates the ‘where to add’ optimization of the prompt into the learning process. Specifically, we reconceptualize the ‘where to add’ optimization as a problem of regional decision-making. During inference, AdaViPro generates a regionalized mask map for the whole image, which is composed of 0 and 1, to designate whether to apply or discard the prompt in each specific area. Therefore, we employ Gumbel-Softmax sampling to enable AdaViPro’s end-to-end learning through standard back-propagation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AdaViPro yields new efficiency and accuracy trade-offs for adapting pre-trained models.