Mixture of prompts learning for vision-language models
Yu Du, Tong Niu, Rong Zhao · Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · 2025
As powerful pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP gain prominence, numerous studies have attempted to combine VLMs for downstream tasks. Among these, prompt learning has been validated as an effective method for adapting to new tasks, which only requires a small number of parameters. However, current prompt learning methods face two challenges: first, a single soft prompt struggles to capture the diverse styles and patterns within a dataset; second, fine-tuning soft prompts is prone to overfitting. To address these challenges, we propose a mixture-of-prompts learning method incorporating a routing module. This module is able to capture a dataset's varied styles and dynamically select the most suitable prompts for each instance. Additionally, we introduce a novel gating mechanism to ensure the router selects prompts based on their similarity to hard prompt templates, which both retains knowledge from hard prompts and improves selection accuracy. We also implement semantically grouped text-level supervision, initializing each soft prompt with the token embeddings of manually designed templates from its group and applying a contrastive loss between the resulted text feature and hard prompt encoded text feature. This supervision ensures that the text features derived from soft prompts remain close to those from their corresponding hard prompts, preserving initial knowledge and mitigating overfitting. Our method has been validated on 11 datasets, demonstrating evident improvements in few-shot learning, domain generalization, and base-to-new generalization scenarios compared to existing baselines. Our approach establishes that multi-prompt specialization with knowledge-preserving routing effectively bridges the adaptability-generalization tradeoff in VLM deployment. The code will be available at https://github.com/dyabel/mocoop.