E2MPL:An Enduring and Efficient Meta Prompt Learning Framework for Few-shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Abstract: Few-shot unsupervised domain adaptation (FS-UDA) leverages a limited amount of labeled data from a source domain to enable accurate classification in an unlabeled target domain. Despite recent advancements, current approaches of FS-UDA continue to confront a major challenge: models often demonstrate instability when adapted to new FS-UDA tasks and necessitate considerable time investment. To address these challenges, we put forward a novel framework called Enduring and Efficient Meta-Prompt Learning (E2MPL) for FS-UDA. Within this framework, we utilize the pre-trained CLIP model as the backbone of feature learning. Firstly, we design domain-shared prompts, consisting of virtual tokens, which primarily capture meta-knowledge from a wide range of meta-tasks to mitigate the domain gaps. Secondly, we develop a task prompt learning network that adaptively learns task-specific specific prompts with the goal of achieving fast and stable task generalization. Thirdly, we formulate the meta-prompt learning process as a bilevel optimization problem, consisting of (outer) meta-prompt learner and (inner) task-specific classifier and domain adapter. Also, the inner objective of each meta-task has the closed-form solution, which enables efficient prompt learning and adaptation to new tasks in a single step. Extensive experimental studies demonstrate the promising performance of our framework in a domain adaptation benchmark dataset DomainNet. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our method has improved accuracy by at least 15.4% and reduced the time by 68.5% on average in 5-way 1-shot tasks, and improved accuracy by 8.7% and reduced the time by 74.1% on average in 5-way 5-shot tasks. Moreover, our approach exhibits more enduring performance than the other methods, i.e., being more stable across 3600 test tasks.