LoKi: Low-dimensional KAN for Efficient Fine-tuning Image Models

Pre-training + fine-tuning' has been widely used in various downstream tasks. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has demonstrated higher efficiency and promising performance compared to traditional full-tuning. The widely used adapter-based and prompt-based methods in PEFT can be uniformly represented as adding an MLP structure to the pre-trained model. These methods are prone to over-fitting in downstream tasks, due to the difference in data scale and distribution. To address this issue, we propose a new adapter-based PEFT module, i.e., LoKi, which consists of an encoder, a learnable activation layer, and a decoder. To maintain the simplicity of LoKi, we use single-layer linear networks for the encoder and decoder, and for the learnable activation layer, we use a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) with the minimal number of layers (only 2 KAN linear layers). With a bottleneck rate much lower than that of Adapter, LoKi is equipped with fewer parameters (only half of Adapter) and eliminates slow training speed and high memory usage of KAN. We conduct extensive experiments on LoKi under image classification and video action recognition across 9 datasets. LoKi demonstrates highly competitive generalization performance compared to other PEFT methods with fewer tunable parameters, ensuring both effectiveness and efficiency.