Meta-Adaptive Prompt Distillation for Few-Shot Visual Question Answering
Authors: name: Akash Gupta; name: Amos Storkey; name: Mirella Lapata
Published: 2025-06-07 19:37:22

Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often rely on in-context learning (ICL) to
perform new tasks with minimal supervision. However, ICL performance,
especially in smaller LMMs, is inconsistent and does not always improve
monotonically with increasing examples. We hypothesize that this occurs due to
the LMM being overwhelmed by additional information present in the image
embeddings, which is not required for the downstream task. To address this, we
propose a meta-learning approach that provides an alternative for inducing
few-shot capabilities in LMMs, using a fixed set of soft prompts that are
distilled from task-relevant image features and can be adapted at test time
using a few examples. To facilitate this distillation, we introduce an
attention-mapper module that can be easily integrated with the popular LLaVA
v1.5 architecture and is jointly learned with soft prompts, enabling task
adaptation in LMMs under low-data regimes with just a few gradient steps.
Evaluation on the VL-ICL Bench shows that our method consistently outperforms
ICL and related prompt-tuning approaches, even under image perturbations,
improving task induction and reasoning across visual question answering tasks.