# Meta-Adapter: An Online Few-shot Learner for Vision-Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03774 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03774/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 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 56 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2023.

## 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 56)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (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)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [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)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [A Survey on Efficient Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09724/) (2025)
- [Adapting Pre-Trained Vision Models for Novel Instance Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17859/) (2024)
- [Keeping Yourself is Important in Downstream Tuning Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04543/) (2025)
- [GrootVL: Tree Topology is All You Need in State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02395/) (2024)
- [VLSM-Adapter: Finetuning Vision-Language Segmentation Efficiently with Lightweight Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06196/) (2024)
- [SANSA: Unleashing the Hidden Semantics in SAM2 for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21795/) (2025)
- [Advancing Multimodal In-Context Learning in Large Vision-Language Models with Task-aware Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04839/) (2025)
- [PromptTA: Prompt-driven Text Adapter for Source-free Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14163/) (2024)
- [Diff-Prompt: Diffusion-Driven Prompt Generator with Mask Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21423/) (2025)
- [From Prediction to Perfection: Introducing Refinement to Autoregressive Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16324/) (2025)
- [Cross-Modal Few-Shot Learning: a Generative Transfer Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10663/) (2024)
- [Data-Efficient CLIP-Powered Dual-Branch Networks for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15811/) (2024)
- [AdaptGCD: Multi-Expert Adapter Tuning for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21705/) (2024)
- [Test-time Alignment-Enhanced Adapter for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15735/) (2024)
- [Mamba-Adaptor: State Space Model Adaptor for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12685/) (2025)
- [Enabling Validation for Robust Few-Shot Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04713/) (2025)
- [LLM meets Vision-Language Models for Zero-Shot One-Class Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00675/) (2024)
- [CLIP's Visual Embedding Projector is a Few-shot Cornucopia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05270/) (2024)
- [LangDA: Building Context-Awareness via Language for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12780/) (2025)
- [MSGCoOp: Multiple Semantic-Guided Context Optimization for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21786/) (2025)
- [Delta Energy: Optimizing Energy Change During Vision-Language Alignment Improves both OOD Detection and OOD Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11296/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Robustness of Vision-Language Models through Orthogonality Learning and Self-Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08374/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Robustness for Unified Multi-Modal Encoders via Efficient Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11895/) (2025)
- [Your Offline Policy is Not Trustworthy: Bilevel Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Portfolio Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12759/) (2025)
- [Adapting Foundation Vision-Language Models to Medical Diagnosis via Query-Driven Expert Bridging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21698/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Active Learning in Vision-Language Models via Parameter-Efficient Uncertainty Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21521/) (2025)
- [Color as the Impetus: Transforming Few-Shot Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22136/) (2025)
- [Attn-Adapter: Attention Is All You Need for Online Few-shot Learner of Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03895/) (2025)
- [Self Identity Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18165/) (2025)
- [Visual Species Recognition with Large Multimodal Models as Post-Hoc Correctors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15748/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The contrastive vision-language pre-training, known as CLIP, demonstrates remarkable potential in perceiving open-world visual concepts, enabling effective zero-shot image recognition. Nevertheless, few-shot learning methods based on CLIP typically require offline fine-tuning of the parameters on few-shot samples, resulting in longer inference time and the risk of over-fitting in certain domains. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Meta-Adapter, a lightweight residual-style adapter, to refine the CLIP features guided by the few-shot samples in an online manner. With a few training samples, our method can enable effective few-shot learning capabilities and generalize to unseen data or tasks without additional fine-tuning, achieving competitive performance and high efficiency. Without bells and whistles, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art online few-shot learning method by an average of 3.6% on eight image classification datasets with higher inference speed. Furthermore, our model is simple and flexible, serving as a plug-and-play module directly applicable to downstream tasks. Without further fine-tuning, Meta-Adapter obtains notable performance improvements in open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation tasks.