Sensitivity-aware Visual Parameter-efficient Tuning

Haoyu He, Jianfei Cai, Jing Zhang, Dacheng Tao, Bohan Zhuang

Keywords: Visual Parameter-efficient Tuning, Fine-tuning, Visual Task Adaptation

Abstract: Visual Parameter-efficient Tuning (VPT) has become a powerful alternative for full fine-tuning, which only updates a small number of parameters while freezing the remaining vast majority of parameters to significantly reduce the storage costs for adapting the pre-trained vision models to downstream tasks. Although the storage burden is largely alleviated, VPT approaches still face many challenges, e.g., lower inference speed and lacking effective configurations for trainable parameters tailored for each task. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach termed Sensitivity-aware visual Parameter-efficient Tuning (SPT) to tackle these challenges. Given a desired tunable parameter budget, SPT quickly identifies the important parameters to the given task in a data-dependent way before fine-tuning, without the complex selection schedule. To increase the representational capacity at a negligible cost within the same parameter budget, we employ low-rank reparameterization to achieve a better trade-off between parameter efficiency and accuracy. Through extensive experiments on a wide range of downstream recognition tasks, our SPT achieves better overall transfer performance than the full fine-tuning and the other VPT approaches, with no additional computational or memory overhead during inference. For instance, SPT saves 99.35% of the trainable parameters than the full fine-tuning while achieving a 7.3% higher average top-1 accuracy on VTAB-1k benchmark with the supervised pre-trained ViT-B backbone. Notably, SPT is also the first work that bridges the gap between full fine-tuning and VPT approaches for backbones under self-supervised pre-training strategies MAE and MoCo v3 on the challenging VTAB-1k benchmark.

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TL;DR: We propose a visual parameter-efficient tuning approach to identify and tune the parameters at task-specific important positions while being inference-efficient.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/sensitivity-aware-visual-parameter-efficient/code)