Adaptive Prompt: Unlocking the Power of Visual Prompt Tuning

Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) has recently emerged as a powerful method for adapting pre-trained vision models to downstream tasks. By introducing learnable prompt tokens as task-specific instructions, VPT effectively guides pre-trained transformer models with minimal overhead. Despite its empirical success, a comprehensive theoretical understanding of VPT remains an active area of research. Building on recent insights into the connection between mixture of experts and prompt-based approaches, we identify a key limitation in VPT: the restricted functional expressiveness in prompt formulation. To address this limitation, we propose Visual Adaptive Prompt Tuning (VAPT), a new generation of prompts that redefines prompts as adaptive functions of the input. Our theoretical analysis shows that this simple yet intuitive approach achieves optimal sample efficiency. Empirical results on VTAB-1K and FGVC further demonstrate VAPT's effectiveness, with performance gains of 7.34% and 1.04% over fully fine-tuning baselines, respectively. Notably, VAPT also surpasses VPT by a substantial margin while using fewer parameters. These results highlight both the effectiveness and efficiency of our method and pave the way for future research to explore the potential of adaptive prompts.