Papers › Token Coordinated Prompt Attention is Needed for Visual Prompting

Token Coordinated Prompt Attention is Needed for Visual Prompting

5 May 2025arXiv:2505.02406archive 2025-07-28

Zichen Liu, Xu Zou, Gang Hua, Jiahuan Zhou

Visual prompting techniques are widely used to efficiently fine-tune pretrained Vision Transformers (ViT) by learning a small set of shared prompts for all tokens. However, existing methods overlook the unique roles of different tokens in conveying discriminative information and interact with all tokens using the same prompts, thereby limiting the representational capacity of ViT. This often leads to indistinguishable and biased prompt-extracted features, hindering performance. To address this issue, we propose a plug-and-play Token Coordinated Prompt Attention (TCPA) module, which assigns specific coordinated prompts to different tokens for attention-based interactions. Firstly, recognizing the distinct functions of CLS and image tokens-global information aggregation and local feature extraction, we disentangle the prompts into CLS Prompts and Image Prompts, which interact exclusively with CLS tokens and image tokens through attention mechanisms. This enhances their respective discriminative abilities. Furthermore, as different image tokens correspond to distinct image patches and contain diverse information, we employ a matching function to automatically assign coordinated prompts to individual tokens. This enables more precise attention interactions, improving the diversity and representational capacity of the extracted features. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that TCPA significantly enhances the diversity and discriminative power of the extracted features. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/ICML2025-TCPA.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

zhoujiahuan1991/icml2025-tcpa officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

DiversityVisual Prompting

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AttentionSETSoftmax

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections