English

Unsupervised Parameter Efficient Source-free Post-pretraining

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-03-03 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Following the success in NLP, the best vision models are now in the billion parameter ranges. Adapting these large models to a target distribution has become computationally and economically prohibitive. Addressing this challenge, we introduce UpStep, an Unsupervised Parameter-efficient Source-free post-pretraining approach, designed to efficiently adapt a base model from a source domain to a target domain: i) we design a self-supervised training scheme to adapt a pretrained model on an unlabeled target domain in a setting where source domain data is unavailable. Such source-free setting comes with the risk of catastrophic forgetting, hence, ii) we propose center vector regularization (CVR), a set of auxiliary operations that minimize catastrophic forgetting and additionally reduces the computational cost by skipping backpropagation in 50\% of the training iterations. Finally iii) we perform this adaptation process in a parameter-efficient way by adapting the pretrained model through low-rank adaptation methods, resulting in a fraction of parameters to optimize. We utilize various general backbone architectures, both supervised and unsupervised, trained on Imagenet as our base model and adapt them to a diverse set of eight target domains demonstrating the adaptability and generalizability of our proposed approach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.21313,
  title  = {Unsupervised Parameter Efficient Source-free Post-pretraining},
  author = {Abhishek Jha and Tinne Tuytelaars and Yuki M. Asano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.21313},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:02:17.362Z