Low-Rank Rescaled Vision Transformer Fine-Tuning: A Residual Design Approach
This work addresses the challenge of balancing generalizable representation and task-specific features in fine-tuning for computer vision, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackles parameter-efficient fine-tuning for Vision Transformers by proposing a Residual-based Low-Rank Rescaling (RLRR) strategy, which achieves competitive performance on downstream image classification tasks while maintaining comparable new parameters.
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning for pre-trained Vision Transformers aims to adeptly tailor a model to downstream tasks by learning a minimal set of new adaptation parameters while preserving the frozen majority of pre-trained parameters. Striking a balance between retaining the generalizable representation capacity of the pre-trained model and acquiring task-specific features poses a key challenge. Currently, there is a lack of focus on guiding this delicate trade-off. In this study, we approach the problem from the perspective of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of pre-trained parameter matrices, providing insights into the tuning dynamics of existing methods. Building upon this understanding, we propose a Residual-based Low-Rank Rescaling (RLRR) fine-tuning strategy. This strategy not only enhances flexibility in parameter tuning but also ensures that new parameters do not deviate excessively from the pre-trained model through a residual design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance across various downstream image classification tasks, all while maintaining comparable new parameters. We believe this work takes a step forward in offering a unified perspective for interpreting existing methods and serves as motivation for the development of new approaches that move closer to effectively considering the crucial trade-off mentioned above. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/zstarN70/RLRR.git}{https://github.com/zstarN70/RLRR.git}.