Minimal Interaction Edge Tuning: A New Paradigm for Visual Adaptation

The rapid scaling of large vision pretrained models makes fine-tuning tasks more and more difficult on edge devices with low computational resources. We explore a new visual adaptation paradigm called edge tuning, which treats large pretrained models as standalone feature extractors that run on powerful cloud servers. The fine-tuning carries out on edge devices with small networks which require low computational resources. Existing methods that are potentially suitable for our edge tuning paradigm are discussed. But, three major drawbacks hinder their application in edge tuning: low adaptation capability, large adapter network, and high information transfer overhead. To address these issues, we propose Minimal Interaction Edge Tuning, or MIET, which reveals that the sum of intermediate features from pretrained models not only has minimal information transfer but also has high adaptation capability. With a lightweight attention-based adaptor network, MIET achieves information transfer efficiency, parameter efficiency, computational and memory efficiency, and at the same time demonstrates competitive results on various visual adaptation benchmarks.

Low-rank Attention Side-Tuning for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

In finetuning a large pretrained model to downstream tasks, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods can effectively finetune pretrained models with few trainable parameters, but suffer from high GPU memory consumption and slow training speed. Because learnable parameters from these methods are entangled with the pretrained model, gradients related to the frozen pretrained model's parameters have to be computed and stored during finetuning. We propose Low-rank Attention Side-Tuning (LAST), which disentangles the trainable module from the pretrained model by freezing not only parameters but also outputs of the pretrained network. LAST trains a side-network composed of only low-rank self-attention modules. By viewing the pretrained model as a frozen feature extractor, the side-network takes intermediate output from the pretrained model and focus on learning task-specific knowledge. We also show that LAST can be highly parallel across multiple optimization objectives, making it very efficient in downstream task adaptation, for example, in finding optimal hyperparameters. LAST outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on VTAB-1K and other visual adaptation tasks with roughly only 30\% of GPU memory footprint and 60\% of training time compared to existing PEFT methods, but achieves significantly higher accuracy.