Do We Really Need a Large Number of Visual Prompts?
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
Due to increasing interest in adapting models on resource-constrained edges, parameter-efficient transfer learning has been widely explored. Among various methods, Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT), prepending learnable prompts to input space, shows competitive fine-tuning performance compared to training of full network parameters. However, VPT increases the number of input tokens, resulting in additional computational overhead. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the number of prompts on fine-tuning performance and self-attention operation in a vision transformer architecture. Through theoretical and empirical analysis we show that adding more prompts does not lead to linear performance improvement. Further, we propose a Prompt Condensation (PC) technique that aims to prevent performance degradation from using a small number of prompts. We validate our methods on FGVC and VTAB-1k tasks and show that our approach reduces the number of prompts by ~70% while maintaining accuracy.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2023.
Builds on
36 of 49 references.
References · 36
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24 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 3; 2025: 5.
9 papers.
- 2025Prompt-based Adaptation in Large-scale Vision Models: A Surveycited by 21
- 2025PRO-VPT: Distribution-Adaptive Visual Prompt Tuning via Prompt Relocationcited by 9
- 2024MoPE: Mixture of Prompt Experts for Parameter-Efficient and Scalable Multimodal Fusioncited by 5
- 2025Token Coordinated Prompt Attention is Needed for Visual Promptingcited by 3
- 2024Proactive Schemes: A Survey of Adversarial Attacks for Social Goodcited by 2
- 2025Multi-Scale Visual Prompting for Lightweight Small-Image Classificationcited by 2
- 2024Harnessing Vision-Language Pretrained Models with Temporal-Aware Adaptation for Referring Video Object Segmentationcited by 1
- 2025VIPAMIN: Visual Prompt Initialization via Embedding Selection and Subspace Expansioncited by 1
- 2023Conditional Prompt Tuning for Multimodal Fusioncited by 0
- 2025Multi-Scale Visual Prompting for Lightweight Small-Image Classification3 Dec 2025
- 2025VIPAMIN: Visual Prompt Initialization via Embedding Selection and Subspace Expansion18 Oct 2025
- 2025Prompt-based Adaptation in Large-scale Vision Models: A Survey15 Oct 2025
- 2025Token Coordinated Prompt Attention is Needed for Visual Prompting5 May 2025
- 2025PRO-VPT: Distribution-Adaptive Visual Prompt Tuning via Prompt Relocation10 Mar 2025
- 2024Proactive Schemes: A Survey of Adversarial Attacks for Social Good24 Sep 2024
- 2024Harnessing Vision-Language Pretrained Models with Temporal-Aware Adaptation for Referring Video Object Segmentation17 May 2024
- 2024MoPE: Mixture of Prompt Experts for Parameter-Efficient and Scalable Multimodal Fusion14 Mar 2024
- 2023Conditional Prompt Tuning for Multimodal Fusion28 Nov 2023