Cross-Modal Feature Alignment and MMD Improve Robustness of Prompt Tuning

Jingchen Sun, Rohan Sharma, Vishnu Lokhande, Changyou Chen; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 4714-4724

Prompt Tuning has emerged as a prominent research paradigm for adapting vision-language models to various downstream tasks. However recent research indicates that prompt tuning methods often lead to overfitting due to limited training samples. In this paper we propose a Cross-modal Aligned Feature Tuning (CRAFT) method to address this issue. Cross-modal alignment is conducted by first selecting anchors from the alternative domain and deriving relative representations of the embeddings for the selected anchors. Optimizing for a feature alignment loss over anchor-aligned text and image modalities creates a more unified text-image common space. Overfitting in prompt tuning also deteriorates model performance on out-of-distribution samples. To further improve the prompt model's robustness we propose minimizing Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) over the anchor-aligned feature spaces to mitigate domain shift. The experiment on four different prompt tuning structures consistently shows the improvement of our method with increases of up to 6.1% in the Base-to-Novel generalization task 5.8% in the group robustness task and 2.7% in the out-of-distribution tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Jingchensun/Craft.