# Unified Vision and Language Prompt Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.07225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07225/

## Key facts

- Cited by 148 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 31 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2022.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/prompt-learning-and-adaptation-of-clip/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [Prompting Visual-Language Models for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04478/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04394/) (2017)
- [Prompt Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03340/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary DETR with Conditional Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11876/) (2022)
- [CPT: Colorful Prompt Tuning for Pre-trained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11797/) (2021)
- [DualCoOp: Fast Adaptation to Multi-Label Recognition with Limited Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09541/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 148)

- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [VisionLLM: Large Language Model is also an Open-Ended Decoder for Vision-Centric Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11175/) (2023)
- [Visual-Language Prompt Tuning with Knowledge-guided Context Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13283/) (2023)
- [What does CLIP know about a red circle? Visual prompt engineering for VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06712/) (2023)
- [Align Your Prompts: Test-Time Prompting with Distribution Alignment for Zero-Shot Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01459/) (2023)
- [Understanding and Improving Visual Prompting: A Label-Mapping Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11635/) (2022)
- [Towards Large-scale 3D Representation Learning with Multi-dataset Point Prompt Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09718/) (2023)
- [CLIP goes 3D: Leveraging Prompt Tuning for Language Grounded 3D Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11313/) (2023)
- [TCP:Textual-based Class-aware Prompt tuning for Visual-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18231/) (2023)
- [BlackVIP: Black-Box Visual Prompting for Robust Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14773/) (2023)
- [E^2VPT: An Effective and Efficient Approach for Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13770/) (2023)
- [Segment Any Anomaly without Training via Hybrid Prompt Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10724/) (2023)
- [Dual Memory Networks: A Versatile Adaptation Approach for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17589/) (2024)
- [Multitask Vision-Language Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11720/) (2022)
- [Texts as Images in Prompt Tuning for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12739/) (2022)
- [Revisiting the Parameter Efficiency of Adapters from the Perspective of Precision Redundancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16867/) (2023)
- [MultiGPrompt for Multi-Task Pre-Training and Prompting on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03731/) (2023)
- [Prompting Segmentation with Sound Is Generalizable Audio-Visual Source Localizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07929/) (2023)
- [Prompt Pre-Training with Twenty-Thousand Classes for Open-Vocabulary Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04704/) (2023)
- [Distribution-Aware Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03406/) (2023)
- [Visual Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06061/) (2023)
- [EventBind: Learning a Unified Representation to Bind Them All for Event-based Open-world Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03135/) (2023)
- [Distilling Large Vision-Language Model with Out-of-Distribution Generalizability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03135/) (2023)
- [Facing the Elephant in the Room: Visual Prompt Tuning or Full Finetuning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12902/) (2024)
- [Non-Homophilic Graph Pre-Training and Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12594/) (2024)
- [Enhancing CLIP with CLIP: Exploring Pseudolabeling for Limited-Label Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01669/) (2023)
- [Visual-Text Cross Alignment: Refining the Similarity Score in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02915/) (2024)
- [Visual Fourier Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01327/) (2024)
- [Visual Instance-aware Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07796/) (2025)
- [Few-shot Adaptation of Multi-modal Foundation Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01736/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prompt tuning, a parameter- and data-efficient transfer learning paradigm that tunes only a small number of parameters in a model's input space, has become a trend in the vision community since the emergence of large vision-language models like CLIP. We present a systematic study on two representative prompt tuning methods, namely text prompt tuning and visual prompt tuning. A major finding is that none of the unimodal prompt tuning methods performs consistently well: text prompt tuning fails on data with high intra-class visual variances while visual prompt tuning cannot handle low inter-class variances. To combine the best from both worlds, we propose a simple approach called Unified Prompt Tuning (UPT), which essentially learns a tiny neural network to jointly optimize prompts across different modalities. Extensive experiments on over 11 vision datasets show that UPT achieves a better trade-off than the unimodal counterparts on few-shot learning benchmarks, as well as on domain generalization benchmarks. Code and models will be released to facilitate future research.