# SAMPLe: SAM-based Optimizer for Prompt Learning in VLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05727 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05727/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 38 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2026.

## 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 38)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (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)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01412/) (2020)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04836/) (2016)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [FILIP: Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07783/) (2021)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [Computing Nonvacuous Generalization Bounds for Deep (Stochastic) Neural Networks with Many More Parameters than Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.11008/) (2017)
- [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)
- [ASAM: Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Scale-Invariant Learning of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11600/) (2021)
- [Self-regulating Prompts: Foundational Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06948/) (2023)
- [When Vision Transformers Outperform ResNets without Pre-training or Strong Data Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01548/) (2021)
- [Prompt Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03340/) (2022)
- [Sensitivity and Generalization in Neural Networks: an Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08760/) (2018)
- [Surrogate Gap Minimization Improves Sharpness-Aware Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08065/) (2022)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization Improves Language Model Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08529/) (2021)
- [Sharpness-Aware Gradient Matching for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10353/) (2023)
- [Fisher SAM: Information Geometry and Sharpness Aware Minimisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04920/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have proven highly effective as foundation models for various downstream applications. However, prompt learning in VLMs encounters a performance-generalization dilemma: while prompts can be tuned to achieve high accuracy on seen distributions, this tuning process often undermines their generalizability to unseen data. The limited set of learnable prompts, which contextualize and condition the input to steer it toward the task within the pretrained VLM, tends to overfit the training data, leading to a trade-off between task-specific performance and preserving generalization. To address this dilemma, we introduce SAMPLe (Sharpness-Aware Minimization Prompt Learning), a plug-in sharpness-aware optimizer that enhances prompt generalizability by accounting for loss landscape sharpness. Unlike conventional methods, SAMPLe balances exploration and exploitation by satisfying objective function constraints at each step, dynamically adapting to the current optimization state based on the local curvature and gradient properties. This approach reduces overfitting on seen distributions and improves adaptability to unseen data, preserving the generalization potential of pre-trained VLM models. We integrate SAMPLe into multiple prompt learning frameworks, including CoOp, CoCoOp, MaPLe, TCP, and Co-Prompt, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse methods. Experiments show that SAMPLe elevates prompt learning frameworks and consistently outperforms existing optimizers across diverse settings, establishing itself as a robust, model-agnostic solution for prompt learning.