Mini but Mighty: Finetuning ViTs with Mini Adapters
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Abstract (arXiv)
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become one of the dominant architectures in computer vision, and pre-trained ViT models are commonly adapted to new tasks via fine-tuning. Recent works proposed several parameter-efficient transfer learning methods, such as adapters, to avoid the prohibitive training and storage cost of finetuning. In this work, we observe that adapters perform poorly when the dimension of adapters is small, and we propose MiMi, a training framework that addresses this issue. We start with large adapters which can reach high performance, and iteratively reduce their size. To enable automatic estimation of the hidden dimension of every adapter, we also introduce a new scoring function, specifically designed for adapters, that compares the neuron importance across layers. Our method outperforms existing methods in finding the best trade-off between accuracy and trained parameters across the three dataset benchmarks DomainNet, VTAB, and Multi-task, for a total of 29 datasets.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 39 of its 62 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Nov 2023.
Builds on
39 of 62 references.
References · 39
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27 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 4; 2026: 1.
6 papers.
- 2024Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-Trained Vision Models: A Survey and Benchmarkcited by 23
- 2025Gradient Inversion Attacks on Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuningcited by 3
- 2025End-to-End Analysis of Charge Stability Diagrams with Transformerscited by 3
- 2025F-Adapter: Frequency-Adaptive Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Scientific Machine Learningcited by 3
- 2025Efficient Adaptation of Deep Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation in Space Applicationscited by 1
- 2026From Pen to Pixel: Translating Hand-Drawn Plots into Graphical APIs via a Novel Benchmark and Efficient Adaptercited by 0
- 2026From Pen to Pixel: Translating Hand-Drawn Plots into Graphical APIs via a Novel Benchmark and Efficient Adapter27 Mar 2026
- 2025F-Adapter: Frequency-Adaptive Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Scientific Machine Learning27 Sep 2025
- 2025End-to-End Analysis of Charge Stability Diagrams with Transformers21 Aug 2025
- 2025Gradient Inversion Attacks on Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning4 Jun 2025
- 2025Efficient Adaptation of Deep Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation in Space Applications22 Apr 2025
- 2024Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-Trained Vision Models: A Survey and Benchmark3 Feb 2024