Query Efficient Black-Box Visual Prompting with Subspace Learning

Zhaogeng Liu, Haozhen Zhang, Hualin Zhang, Xingchen Li, Wanli Shi, Bin Gu, Yi Chang; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 4322-4331

Visual Prompt Learning (VPL) has emerged as a powerful strategy for harnessing the capabilities of large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) to tackle specific downstream tasks. However, the opaque nature of PTMs in many real-world applications has led to a growing interest in gradient-free approaches within VPL. A significant challenge with existing black-box VPL methods lies in the high dimensionality of visual prompts, which necessitates considerable API queries for tuning, thereby impacting efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a novel query-efficient framework for black-box visual prompting, designed to generate input-dependent visual prompts efficiently for large-scale black-box PTMs. Our framework is built upon the insight of reparameterizing prompts using neural networks, improving the typical pre-training-fine-tuning paradigm through the subspace learning strategy to maximize efficiency and adaptability from both the perspective of initial weights and parameter dimensionality. This tuning intrinsically optimizes low-dimensional representations within the well-learned subspace, enabling the efficient adaptation of the network to downstream tasks. Our approach significantly reduces the necessity for substantial API queries to PTMs, presenting an efficient method for leveraging large-scale black-box PTMs in visual prompting tasks. Most experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showcasing substantial reductions in the number of required API queries to PTMs while maintaining or even enhancing performance on downstream tasks.