# CoLA: Cross-Modal Low-rank Adaptation for Multimodal Downstream Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03314 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03314/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [Compacter: Efficient Low-Rank Hypercomplex Adapter Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04647/) (2021)
- [BEATs: Audio Pre-Training with Acoustic Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09058/) (2022)
- [CRIS: CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15174/) (2021)
- [TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08541/) (2021)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05042/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformers are Parameter-Efficient Audio-Visual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07983/) (2022)
- [Bridging Vision and Language Encoders: Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11545/) (2023)
- [Shifting More Attention to Visual Backbone: Query-modulated Refinement Networks for End-to-End Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15442/) (2022)
- [TransVG++: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Language Conditioned Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06619/) (2022)
- [Language Adaptive Weight Generation for Multi-task Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04652/) (2023)
- [Cross-modal Prompts: Adapting Large Pre-trained Models for Audio-Visual Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05152/) (2023)
- [HiVG: Hierarchical Multimodal Fine-grained Modulation for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13400/) (2024)
- [CoupAlign: Coupling Word-Pixel with Sentence-Mask Alignments for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01769/) (2022)
- [Densely Connected Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08580/) (2025)
- [An Efficient and Effective Transformer Decoder-Based Framework for Multi-Task Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01120/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation models have revolutionized AI, but adapting them efficiently for multimodal tasks, particularly in dual-stream architectures composed of unimodal encoders, such as DINO and BERT, remains a significant challenge. ParameterEfficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LowRank Adaptation (LoRA) enable lightweight adaptation, yet they operate in isolation within each modality, limiting their ability in capturing cross-modal interactions. In this paper, we take a step in bridging this gap with Cross-Modal LowRank Adaptation (CoLA), a novel PEFT framework that extends LoRA by introducing a dedicated inter-modal adaptation pathway alongside the standard intra-modal one. This dual-path design enables CoLA to adapt unimodal foundation models to multimodal tasks effectively, without interference between modality-specific and crossmodal learning. We evaluate CoLA across a range of vision-language (RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg) and audio-visual (AVE, AVS) benchmarks, where it consistently outperforms LORA, achieving a relative gain of around 3% and 2%, respectively, while maintaining parameter efficiency. Notably, CoLA enables the first multitask PEFT framework for visual grounding, bridging a key gap in efficient multimodal adaptation. Code is available at https://github.com/peterwisu/CoLA