Papers › Visual Prompt Tuning

Visual Prompt Tuning

23 Mar 2022arXiv:2203.12119archive 2025-07-28

Menglin Jia, Luming Tang, Bor-Chun Chen, Claire Cardie, Serge Belongie, Bharath Hariharan, Ser-Nam Lim

The current modus operandi in adapting pre-trained models involves updating all the backbone parameters, ie, full fine-tuning. This paper introduces Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) as an efficient and effective alternative to full fine-tuning for large-scale Transformer models in vision. Taking inspiration from recent advances in efficiently tuning large language models, VPT introduces only a small amount (less than 1% of model parameters) of trainable parameters in the input space while keeping the model backbone frozen. Via extensive experiments on a wide variety of downstream recognition tasks, we show that VPT achieves significant performance gains compared to other parameter efficient tuning protocols. Most importantly, VPT even outperforms full fine-tuning in many cases across model capacities and training data scales, while reducing per-task storage cost.

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KMnP/vpt officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
TooTouch/VPT mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
Yiming-M/CLIP-EBC mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
heekhero/DTL mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
wgcban/apt mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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1ran · honoured contract
1ran · violated contract
1ran · our draft was wrong
1ran · fixture could not drive it
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Tasks

Image ClassificationLong-tail LearningPrompt EngineeringVisual Prompt Tuning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-100-LT (ρ=10) VPT Error Rate 10.4 #3 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-100-LT (ρ=100) VPT Error Rate 19 #4 of 66 Archive leaderboard report
Long-tail Learning CIFAR-100-LT (ρ=50) VPT Error Rate 15.2 #3 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Prompt Engineering ImageNet-21k VPT Accuracy 24.8 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning FGVC VPT-Deep(ViT-B/16_MoCo_v3_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 83.12 #4 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning FGVC VPT-Shallow (ViT-B/16_MoCo_v3_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 79.26 #6 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning FGVC VPT-Deep (ViT-B/16_MAE_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 72.02 #9 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning FGVC VPT-Shallow (ViT-B/16_MAE_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 57.84 #10 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Natural<7>) VPT-Deep(ViT-B/16_MoCo_v3_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 70.27 #4 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Natural<7>) VPT-Shallow(ViT-B/16_MoCo_v3_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 67.34 #5 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Natural<7>) VPT-Shallow(ViT-B/16_MAE_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 39.96 #9 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Natural<7>) VPT-Deep(ViT-B/16_MAE_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 36.02 #10 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Specialized<4>) VPT-Deep(ViT-B/16_MoCo_v3_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 83.04 #5 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Specialized<4>) VPT-Shallow(ViT-B/16_MoCo_v3_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 82.26 #6 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Specialized<4>) VPT-Shallow(ViT-B/16_MAE_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 69.65 #9 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Specialized<4>) VPT-Deep(ViT-B/16_MAE_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 60.61 #10 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Structured<8>) VPT-Deep(ViT-B/16_MoCo_v3_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 42.38 #6 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Structured<8>) VPT-Shallow(ViT-B/16_MoCo_v3_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 37.55 #7 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Structured<8>) VPT-Shallow(ViT-B/16_MAE_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 27.50 #9 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Prompt Tuning VTAB-1k(Structured<8>) VPT-Deep(ViT-B/16_MAE_pretrained_ImageNet-1K) Mean Accuracy 26.57 #10 of 10 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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