A Good Prompt Is Worth Millions of Parameters: Low-resource Prompt-based Learning for Vision-Language Models

Woojeong Jin, Yu Cheng, Yelong Shen, Weizhu Chen, Xiang Ren


Abstract
Large pre-trained vision-language (VL) models can learn a new task with a handful of examples and generalize to a new task without fine-tuning. However, these VL models are hard to deploy for real-world applications due to their impractically huge sizes and slow inference speed. To solve this limitation, we study prompt-based low-resource learning of VL tasks with our proposed method, FewVLM, relatively smaller than recent few-shot learners. For FewVLM, we pre-train a sequence-to-sequence transformer model with prefix language modeling (PrefixLM) and masked language modeling (MaskedLM).Furthermore, we analyze the effect of diverse prompts for few-shot tasks. Experimental results on VQA show that FewVLM with prompt-based learning outperforms Frozen which is 31x larger than FewVLM by 18.2% point and achieves comparable results to a 246x larger model, PICa.In our analysis, we observe that (1) prompts significantly affect zero-shot performance but marginally affect few-shot performance, (2) models with noisy prompts learn as quickly as hand-crafted prompts given larger training data, and (3) MaskedLM helps VQA tasks while PrefixLM boosts captioning performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/woojeongjin/FewVLM
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.197
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2763–2775
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.197
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.197
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Woojeong Jin, Yu Cheng, Yelong Shen, Weizhu Chen, and Xiang Ren. 2022. A Good Prompt Is Worth Millions of Parameters: Low-resource Prompt-based Learning for Vision-Language Models. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2763–2775, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Good Prompt Is Worth Millions of Parameters: Low-resource Prompt-based Learning for Vision-Language Models (Jin et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.197.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.197.mp4
Code
 woojeongjin/fewvlm
Data
Flickr30kGQAMS COCONoCapsOK-VQAVisual GenomeVisual Question Answering v2.0mini-Imagenet