LPT: Long-tailed Prompt Tuning for Image Classification

Bowen Dong, Pan Zhou, Shuicheng Yan, Wangmeng Zuo

Abstract: For long-tailed classification tasks, most works often pretrain a big model on a large-scale (unlabeled) dataset, and then fine-tune the whole pretrained model for adapting to long-tailed data. Though promising, fine-tuning the whole pretrained model tends to suffer from high cost in computation and deployment of different models for different tasks, as well as weakened generalization capability for overfitting to certain features of long-tailed data. To alleviate these issues, we propose an effective Long-tailed Prompt Tuning (LPT) method for long-tailed classification tasks. LPT introduces several trainable prompts into a frozen pretrained model to adapt it to long-tailed data. For better effectiveness, we divide prompts into two groups: 1) a shared prompt for the whole long-tailed dataset to learn general features and to adapt a pretrained model into the target long-tailed domain; and 2) group-specific prompts to gather group-specific features for the samples which have similar features and also to empower the pretrained model with fine-grained discrimination ability. Then we design a two-phase training paradigm to learn these prompts. In the first phase, we train the shared prompt via conventional supervised prompt tuning to adapt a pretrained model to the desired long-tailed domain. In the second phase, we use the learnt shared prompt as query to select a small best matched set for a group of similar samples from the group-specific prompt set to dig the common features of these similar samples, and then optimize these prompts with a dual sampling strategy and the asymmetric Gaussian Clouded Logit loss. By only fine-tuning a few prompts while fixing the pretrained model, LPT can reduce training cost and deployment cost by storing a few prompts, and enjoys a strong generalization ability of the pretrained model. Experiments show that on various long-tailed benchmarks, with only $\sim$1.1\% extra trainable parameters, LPT achieves comparable or higher performance than previous whole model fine-tuning methods, and is more robust to domain-shift.

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