# GIST: Improving Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning via Knowledge Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07255 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07255/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00121/) (2017)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [Compacter: Efficient Low-Rank Hypercomplex Adapter Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04647/) (2021)
- [A Large-scale Study of Representation Learning with the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04867/) (2019)
- [Rotation Equivariant CNNs for Digital Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03962/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-Trained Vision Models: A Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02242/) (2024)
- [FTII-Bench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Benchmark for Flow Text with Image Insertion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12564/) (2024)
- [iDAT: inverse Distillation Adapter-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15750/) (2024)
- [Understanding Robustness of Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09845/) (2024)
- [FDBPL: Faster Distillation-Based Prompt Learning for Region-Aware Vision-Language Models Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18053/) (2025)
- [An Adapter-free Fine-tuning Approach for Tuning 3D Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23730/) (2026)
- [GenFT: A Generative Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Method for Pretrained Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11042/) (2025)
- [ExFusion: Efficient Transformer Training via Multi-Experts Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27965/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method, which adjusts or introduces fewer trainable parameters to calibrate pre-trained models on downstream tasks, has become a recent research interest. However, existing PEFT methods within the traditional fine-tiuning framework have two main shortcomings: 1) They overlook the explicit association between trainable parameters and downstream task knowledge. 2) They neglect the interaction between the intrinsic task-agnostic knowledge of pre-trained models and the task-specific knowledge in downstream tasks. To address this gap, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework, named GIST, in a plug-and-play manner. Specifically, our framework first introduces a trainable token, called the Gist token, when applying PEFT methods on downstream tasks. This token serves as an aggregator of the task-specific knowledge learned by the PEFT methods and forms an explicit association with downstream knowledge. Furthermore, to facilitate explicit interaction between task-agnostic and task-specific knowledge, we introduce the concept of Knowledge Interaction via a Bidirectional Kullback-Leibler Divergence objective. As a result, PEFT methods within our framework can make the pre-trained model understand downstream tasks more comprehensively by leveraging the knowledge interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the universality and scalability of our framework. Notably, on the VTAB-1K benchmark, we employ the Adapter (a prevalent PEFT method) within our GIST framework and achieve a performance boost of 2.25%, with an increase of only 0.8K parameters. The Code will be released.