# Adapter-X: A Novel General Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Framework for Vision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03051 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03051/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [AdapterFusion: Non-Destructive Task Composition for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00247/) (2020)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [Compacter: Efficient Low-Rank Hypercomplex Adapter Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04647/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Network Design and Local Geometry in Point Cloud: A Simple Residual MLP Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07123/) (2022)
- [LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01933/) (2023)
- [VeRA: Vector-based Random Matrix Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11454/) (2023)
- [Scaling & Shifting Your Features: A New Baseline for Efficient Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08823/) (2022)
- [Point-M2AE: Multi-scale Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14401/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Point Cloud Pre-Training via Occlusion Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01089/) (2020)
- [Contrast with Reconstruct: Contrastive 3D Representation Learning Guided by Generative Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02318/) (2023)
- [UniPELT: A Unified Framework for Parameter-Efficient Language Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07577/) (2021)
- [On the Representation Collapse of Sparse Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09179/) (2022)
- [Masked Discrimination for Self-Supervised Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11183/) (2022)
- [Neural Prompt Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04673/) (2022)
- [KronA: Parameter Efficient Tuning with Kronecker Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10650/) (2022)
- [Autoencoders as Cross-Modal Teachers: Can Pretrained 2D Image Transformers Help 3D Representation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08320/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning in Spectral Domain for Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08114/) (2024)
- [Positional Prompt Tuning for Efficient 3D Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11567/) (2024)
- [PointLoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation with Token Selection for Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16023/) (2025)
- [Attention, Please! Revisiting Attentive Probing Through the Lens of Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10178/) (2025)
- [Multiple-Exit Tuning: Towards Inference-Efficient Adaptation for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13999/) (2024)
- [Token Adaptation via Side Graph Convolution for Efficient Fine-tuning of 3D Point Cloud Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14142/) (2025)
- [MuSASplat: Efficient Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splats via Lightweight Multi-Scale Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07165/) (2025)
- [IV-tuning: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Infrared-Visible Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16654/) (2024)
- [Live Interactive Training for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26929/) (2026)
- [5% > 100%: Flatness Preference is All You Need for Multimodal Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10488/) (2026)
- [Semantic-guided Fine-tuning of Foundation Model for Long-tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12807/) (2025)
- [IPA: An Information-Reconstructive Input Projection Framework for Efficient Foundation Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04398/) (2025)
- [Parameter-Efficient Domain Adaption for CSI Crowd-Counting via Self-Supervised Learning with Adapter Modules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02203/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become increasingly important as foundation models continue to grow in both popularity and size. Adapter has been particularly well-received due to their potential for parameter reduction and adaptability across diverse tasks. However, striking a balance between high efficiency and robust generalization across tasks remains a challenge for adapter-based methods. We analyze existing methods and find that: 1) parameter sharing is the key to reducing redundancy; 2) more tunable parameters, dynamic allocation, and block-specific design are keys to improving performance. Unfortunately, no previous work considers all these factors. Inspired by this insight, we introduce a novel framework named Adapter-X. First, a Sharing Mixture of Adapters (SMoA) module is proposed to fulfill token-level dynamic allocation, increased tunable parameters, and inter-block sharing at the same time. Second, some block-specific designs like Prompt Generator (PG) are introduced to further enhance the ability of adaptation. Extensive experiments across 2D image and 3D point cloud modalities demonstrate that Adapter-X represents a significant milestone as it is the first to outperform full fine-tuning in both 2D image and 3D point cloud modalities with significantly fewer parameters, i.e., only 0.20% and 1.88% of original trainable parameters for 2D and 3D classification tasks. Our code will be publicly available.