{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/vl-adapter-parameter-efficient-transfer","title":"VL-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-and-Language Tasks","arxiv_id":"2112.06825","date":"2021-12-13","proceeding":"CVPR 2022 1","authors":["Yi-Lin Sung","Jaemin Cho","Mohit Bansal"],"abstract":"Recently, fine-tuning language models pre-trained on large text corpora have provided huge improvements on vision-and-language (V&L) tasks as well as on pure language tasks. However, fine-tuning the entire parameter set of pre-trained models becomes impractical since the model size is growing rapidly. Hence, in this paper, we introduce adapter-based parameter-efficient transfer learning techniques to V&L models such as VL-BART and VLT5. We evaluate our methods in a unified multi-task setup on both image-text and video-text benchmarks. For the image-text tasks, we use four diverse V&L datasets: VQAv2, GQA, NLVR2 , and MSCOCO image captioning. For video-text tasks, we use TVQA, How2QA, TVC, and YC2C. With careful training and thorough experiments, we benchmark three popular adapter-based methods (Adapter, Hyperformer, Compacter) against the standard full fine-tuning and the recently proposed prompt-tuning approach. We also enhance the efficiency and performance of adapters by sharing their weights to attain knowledge across tasks. Our results demonstrate that training the adapter with the weight-sharing technique (4.18% of total parameters for image-text tasks and 3.39% for video-text tasks) can match the performance of fine-tuning the entire model. Lastly, we present a comprehensive analysis including the combination of adapter and task-specific prompts and the impact of V&L pre-training on adapters. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ylsung/VL_adapter.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06825v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.06825v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"vl-adapter-parameter-efficient-transfer","repo_url":"https://github.com/ylsung/vl_adapter","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-captioning","task_name":"Image Captioning"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adapter","method_name":"Adapter"},{"method_slug":"vl-t5","method_name":"VL-T5"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2112.06825","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2112.06825"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/ylsung/vl_adapter","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"2abb955708c84118","entry":"linear_layer","repo":"ylsung/vl_adapter","repo_kind":"official","path":"VL-T5/src/adapters/adapter_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/ylsung/vl_adapter/blob/HEAD/VL-T5/src/adapters/adapter_utils.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"2abb955708c84118"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}