ExPLoRA: Parameter-Efficient Extended Pre-Training to Adapt Vision Transformers under Domain Shifts

TL;DR

ExPLoRA introduces a parameter-efficient, self-supervised pre-training method for vision transformers that enhances domain adaptation, outperforming traditional fine-tuning approaches especially in resource-constrained settings.

Contribution

The paper proposes ExPLoRA, a novel technique combining self-supervised pre-training and LoRA-based fine-tuning to improve domain transfer of vision transformers with minimal additional parameters.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on satellite imagery domain.

Up to 8% improvement in linear probing accuracy.

Uses less than 10% of parameters compared to full fine-tuning.

Abstract

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) can effectively adapt large pre-trained foundation models to downstream tasks using only a small fraction (0.1%-10%) of the original trainable weights. An under-explored question of PEFT is in extending the pre-training phase without supervised labels; that is, can we adapt a pre-trained foundation model to a new domain via efficient self-supervised pre-training on this domain? In this work, we introduce ExPLoRA, a highly effective technique to improve transfer learning of pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs) under domain shifts. Initializing a ViT with pre-trained weights on large, natural-image datasets such as from DinoV2 or MAE, ExPLoRA continues the unsupervised pre-training objective on a new domain, unfreezing 1-2 pre-trained ViT blocks and tuning all other layers with LoRA. We then fine-tune the resulting model only with LoRA on this new domain for supervised learning. Our experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results on satellite imagery, even outperforming fully pre-training and fine-tuning ViTs. Using the DinoV2 training objective, we demonstrate up to 8% improvement in linear probing top-1 accuracy on downstream tasks while using <10% of the number of parameters that are used in prior fully-tuned state-of-the-art approaches. Our ablation studies confirm the efficacy of our approach over other baselines such as PEFT. Code is available on the project website: https://samar-khanna.github.io/ExPLoRA/