English

Lightweight Prompt-Guided CLIP Adaptation for Monocular Depth Estimation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-02 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Leveraging the rich semantic features of vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP for monocular depth estimation tasks is a promising direction, yet often requires extensive fine-tuning or lacks geometric precision. We present a parameter-efficient framework, named MoA-DepthCLIP, that adapts pretrained CLIP representations for monocular depth estimation with minimal supervision. Our method integrates a lightweight Mixture-of-Adapters (MoA) module into the pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT-B/32) backbone combined with selective fine-tuning of the final layers. This design enables spatially-aware adaptation, guided by a global semantic context vector and a hybrid prediction architecture that synergizes depth bin classification with direct regression. To enhance structural accuracy, we employ a composite loss function that enforces geometric constraints. On the NYU Depth V2 benchmark, MoA-DepthCLIP achieves competitive results, significantly outperforming the DepthCLIP baseline by improving the δ1\delta_1 accuracy from 0.390 to 0.745 and reducing the RMSE from 1.176 to 0.520. These results are achieved while requiring substantially few trainable parameters, demonstrating that lightweight, prompt-guided MoA is a highly effective strategy for transferring VLM knowledge to fine-grained monocular depth estimation tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.01118,
  title  = {Lightweight Prompt-Guided CLIP Adaptation for Monocular Depth Estimation},
  author = {Reyhaneh Ahani Manghotay and Jie Liang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.01118},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:49:21.664Z