# MePT: Multi-Representation Guided Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09706 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09706/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 28 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2024.

## 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, 28 of 28)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01903/) (2021)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [Prompt-aligned Gradient for Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14865/) (2022)
- [Generic Attention-model Explainability for Interpreting Bi-Modal and Encoder-Decoder Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15679/) (2021)
- [Visual-Language Prompt Tuning with Knowledge-guided Context Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13283/) (2023)
- [Self-regulating Prompts: Foundational Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06948/) (2023)
- [Patching open-vocabulary models by interpolating weights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05592/) (2022)
- [Alpha-CLIP: A CLIP Model Focusing on Wherever You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03818/) (2023)
- [CALIP: Zero-Shot Enhancement of CLIP with Parameter-free Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14169/) (2022)
- [TCP:Textual-based Class-aware Prompt tuning for Visual-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18231/) (2023)
- [BlackVIP: Black-Box Visual Prompting for Robust Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14773/) (2023)
- [Improving Visual Prompt Tuning for Self-supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05067/) (2023)
- [KD3A: Unsupervised Multi-Source Decentralized Domain Adaptation via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09757/) (2020)
- [Optimizing Relevance Maps of Vision Transformers Improves Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01161/) (2022)
- [Revisiting the Power of Prompt for Visual Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02382/) (2024)
- [No Token Left Behind: Explainability-Aided Image Classification and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04908/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13787/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have highlighted the significant potential of prompt tuning for adapting these models to a wide range of downstream tasks. However, existing prompt tuning methods typically map an image to a single representation, limiting the model's ability to capture the diverse ways an image can be described. To address this limitation, we investigate the impact of visual prompts on the model's generalization capability and introduce a novel method termed Multi-Representation Guided Prompt Tuning (MePT). Specifically, MePT employs a three-branch framework that focuses on diverse salient regions, uncovering the inherent knowledge within images which is crucial for robust generalization. Further, we employ efficient self-ensemble techniques to integrate these versatile image representations, allowing MePT to learn all conditional, marginal, and fine-grained distributions effectively. We validate the effectiveness of MePT through extensive experiments, demonstrating significant improvements on both base-to-novel class prediction and domain generalization tasks.
