Learning Visual Prompts for Guiding the Attention of Vision Transformers

Abstract

Visual prompting infuses visual information into the input image to adapt models toward specific predictions and tasks. Recently, manually crafted markers such as red circles are shown to guide the model to attend to a target region on the image. However, these markers only work on models trained with data containing those markers. Moreover, finding these prompts requires guesswork or prior knowledge of the domain on which the model is trained. This work circumvents manual design constraints by proposing to learn the visual prompts for guiding the attention of vision transformers. The learned visual prompt, added to any input image would redirect the attention of the pre-trained vision transformer to its spatial location on the image. Specifically, the prompt is learned in a self-supervised manner without requiring annotations and without fine-tuning the vision transformer. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimization-based visual prompting strategy across various pre-trained vision encoders.