# Generalizable Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03189/

## 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 30 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 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, 30 of 30)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (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)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [SimVLM: Simple Visual Language Model Pretraining with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10904/) (2021)
- [Invariant Information Clustering for Unsupervised Image Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06653/) (2018)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [Prompt-aligned Gradient for Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14865/) (2022)
- [Visual-Language Prompt Tuning with Knowledge-guided Context Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13283/) (2023)
- [Fine-tuned CLIP Models are Efficient Video Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03640/) (2022)
- [SaliencyMix: A Saliency Guided Data Augmentation Strategy for Better Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01791/) (2020)
- [Unified Vision and Language Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07225/) (2022)
- [CLIP model is an Efficient Continual Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03114/) (2022)
- [Debiased Fine-Tuning for Vision-language Models by Prompt Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12429/) (2023)
- [Over-training with Mixup May Hurt Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01475/) (2023)
- [Non-Exemplar Online Class-incremental Continual Learning via Dual-prototype Self-augment and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10891/) (2023)
- [REQA: Coarse-to-fine Assessment of Image Quality to Alleviate the Range Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01760/) (2022)

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

- [VLAgeBench: Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models for Zero-Shot Human Age Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26015/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prompt tuning for vision-language models such as CLIP involves optimizing the text prompts used to generate image-text pairs for specific downstream tasks. While hand-crafted or template-based prompts are generally applicable to a wider range of unseen classes, they tend to perform poorly in downstream tasks (i.e., seen classes). Learnable soft prompts, on the other hand, often perform well in downstream tasks but lack generalizability. Additionally, prior research has predominantly concentrated on the textual modality, with very few studies attempting to explore the prompt's generalization potential from the visual modality. Keeping these limitations in mind, we investigate how to prompt tuning to obtain both a competitive downstream performance and generalization. The study shows that by treating soft and hand-crafted prompts as dual views of the textual modality, and maximizing their mutual information, we can better ensemble task-specific and general semantic information. Moreover, to generate more expressive prompts, the study introduces a class-wise augmentation from the visual modality, resulting in significant robustness to a wider range of unseen classes. Extensive evaluations on several benchmarks report that the proposed approach achieves competitive results in terms of both task-specific performance and general abilities.