Divergence-enhanced Knowledge-guided Context Optimization for Visual-Language Prompt Tuning

Prompt tuning vision-language models like CLIP has shown great potential in learning transferable representations for various downstream tasks. The main issue is how to mitigate the over-fitting problem on downstream tasks with limited training samples. While knowledge-guided context optimization has been proposed by constructing consistency constraints to handle catastrophic forgetting in the pre-trained backbone, it also introduces a bias toward pre-training. This paper proposes a novel and simple Divergence-enhanced Knowledge-guided Prompt Tuning (DeKg) method to address this issue. The key insight is that the bias toward pre-training can be alleviated by encouraging the independence between the learnable and the crafted prompt. Specifically, DeKg employs the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to regularize the learnable prompts, thereby reducing their dependence on prior general knowledge, and enabling divergence induced by target knowledge. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that DeKg serves as a plug-and-play module that can seamlessly integrate with existing knowledge-guided context optimization methods and achieves superior performance in three challenging benchmarks. We make our code available at https://github.com/cnunlp/DeKg.