Cited by 17Multimodal Machine Learning ApplicationsDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningAdvanced Neural Network Applications

Exploring the Transferability of Visual Prompting for Multimodal Large Language Models

Open access
Zhang, Yichi, Dong, Yinpeng, Zhang, Siyuan, Min, Tianzan, Su, Hang, Zhu, Jun·2024·2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Abstract

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising versatile capabilities, their performance is still inferior to specialized models on down-stream tasks, which makes adaptation necessary to enhance their utility. However, fine-tuning methods require indepen-dent training for every model, leading to huge computation and memory overheads. In this paper, we propose a novel setting where we aim to improve the performance of diverse MLLMs with a group of shared parameters optimized for a downstream task. To achieve this, we propose Transferable Visual Prompting (TVP), a simple and effective approach to generate visual prompts that can transfer to different models and improve their performance on downstream tasks after trained on only one model. We introduce two strategies to address the issue of cross-model feature corruption of existing visual prompting methods and enhance the transferabil-ity of the learned prompts, including 1) Feature Consistency Alignment: which imposes constraints to the prompted feature changes to maintain task-agnostic knowledge; 2) Task Semantics Enrichment: which encourages the prompted images to contain richer task-specific semantics with language guidance. We validate the effectiveness of TVP through ex-tensive experiments with 6 modern MLLMs on a wide vari-ety of tasks ranging from object recognition and counting to multimodal reasoning and hallucination correction.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/cvpr52733.2024.02508

Cites

65 of 65 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The visual perception limitations of MLLMs affect their performance on visual understanding tasks, especially when facing small low-resolution objects.

    “The visual perception limitations of MLLMs affect their performance on visual understanding tasks, especially when facing small low-resolution objects [54].”

    From Interaction2Code: Benchmarking MLLM-based Interactive Webpage Code Generation from Interactive Prototyping (2024) · cites this paper as Zhang et al., 2024

    The Introduction says MLLMs can perform unsatisfactorily on downstream visual tasks, and Section 2.1 says they fall short of specialized models on specific tasks. Neither passage establishes that their limitations are especially pronounced for small, low-resolution objects; searches for those terms found no such finding in our copy. Page numbers were not available. (LLM, conf=0.85)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

4 of the 69 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 9

  1. Huanran Chen, Yichi Zhang, Yinpeng Dong, and Jun Zhu. Rethinking model ensemble in transfer-based adversarial at- tacks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.09105, 2023. 7 · arXiv
  2. Yinpeng Dong, Fangzhou Liao, Tianyu Pang, Hang Su, Jun Zhu, Xiaolin Hu, and Jianguo Li. Boosting adversarial at- tacks with momentum. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages 9185-9193, 2018. 3, 7
  3. Dan Hendrycks and Thomas Dietterich. Benchmarking neu- ral network robustness to common corruptions and perturba- tions. In International Conference on Learning Representa- tions, 2019. 8, 2, 4
  4. Wenbo Hu, Yifan Xu, Y Li, W Li, Z Chen, and Z Tu. Bliva: A simple multimodal llm for better handling of text-rich vi- sual questions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.09936, 2023. 1, 3, 5 · arXiv
  5. Menglin Jia, Luming Tang, Bor-Chun Chen, Claire Cardie, Serge Belongie, Bharath Hariharan, and Ser-Nam Lim. Vi- sual prompt tuning. In Computer Vision -ECCV 2022, pages 709-727, 2022. 2, 3, 6, 8
  6. Yuval Netzer, Tao Wang, Adam Coates, Alessandro Bis- sacco, Bo Wu, and Andrew Y. Ng. Reading digits in natural images with unsupervised feature learning. In NIPS Work- shop on Deep Learning and Unsupervised Feature Learning 2011, 2011. 1, 5
  7. Yuexiang Zhai, Shengbang Tong, Xiao Li, Mu Cai, Qing Qu, Yong Jae Lee, and Yi Ma. Investigating the catastrophic for- getting in multimodal large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.10313, 2023. 1 · arXiv
  8. Ao Zhang, Hao Fei, Yuan Yao, Wei Ji, Li Li, Zhiyuan Liu, and Tat-Seng Chua. Transfer visual prompt generator across llms. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Sys- tems, 2023. 2, 5, 7, 1
  9. Wen Zhou, Xin Hou, Yongjun Chen, Mengyun Tang, Xi- angqi Huang, Xiang Gan, and Yong Yang. Transferable ad- versarial perturbations. In Computer Vision -ECCV 2018, pages 452-467, 2018. 2, 3, 4

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Zhang, Y., Dong, Y., Zhang, S., Min, T., Su, H., & Zhu, J.
Affiliations
Tsinghua University (CN)
Venue
2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2024-06-16
Pages
26552-26562
ISSN
1063-6919 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4402727038
Cited by
17
References
69
Citations by year
2026: 7 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 1
FWCI
3.52
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings - IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
  • National Key Research and Development Program of China (2020AAA0I06302)
  • NSFC (92370124,62350080,92248303,62276149,U2341228,62061136001,62076147)
  • Tsinghua University
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
Keywords
multimodal large language models, visual prompting, cross-model transfer, multimodal reasoning, hallucination correction

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review