NODE-Adapter: Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for Better Vision-Language Reasoning
This work addresses the problem of adapting Vision-Language Models to downstream tasks more efficiently for researchers and practitioners, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing prototype-based methods with a novel optimization technique.
The paper tackles the problem of prototype-based vision-language reasoning by addressing challenges like high resource demands and excessive parameters, proposing NODE-Adapter which uses Neural ODEs for cross-modal prototype optimization, resulting in significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods in few-shot classification, domain generalization, and visual reasoning tasks.
In this paper, we consider the problem of prototype-based vision-language reasoning problem. We observe that existing methods encounter three major challenges: 1) escalating resource demands and prolonging training times, 2) contending with excessive learnable parameters, and 3) fine-tuning based only on a single modality. These challenges will hinder their capability to adapt Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. Motivated by this critical observation, we propose a novel method called NODE-Adapter, which utilizes Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for better vision-language reasoning. To fully leverage both visual and textual modalities and estimate class prototypes more effectively and accurately, we divide our method into two stages: cross-modal prototype construction and cross-modal prototype optimization using neural ordinary differential equations. Specifically, we exploit VLM to encode hand-crafted prompts into textual features and few-shot support images into visual features. Then, we estimate the textual prototype and visual prototype by averaging the textual features and visual features, respectively, and adaptively combine the textual prototype and visual prototype to construct the cross-modal prototype. To alleviate the prototype bias, we then model the prototype optimization process as an initial value problem with Neural ODEs to estimate the continuous gradient flow. Our extensive experimental results, which cover few-shot classification, domain generalization, and visual reasoning on human-object interaction, demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.