Reprogramming Vision-Language Models via Structured Prompt Reparameterization

Abstract

Visual reprogramming adapts pretrained models to downstream tasks by modifying their input and output interfaces while keeping the backbone fixed. In vision-language models, existing methods mainly rely on intra-class prompt aggregation and do not explicitly model relationships among classes. However, fine-grained categories often exhibit highly overlapping attribute descriptions and strong inter-class correlation in the text embedding space, where discriminative cues lie in subtle low-variance components. We propose Reparameterized Inter-Class Visual Reprogramming (RVP), a structured framework that aggregates multiple text prompts within each class and applies residual correction across classes. We also show that CLIP-based visual reprogramming with input-independent linear output aggregation can be expressed as a linear mapping from frozen image embeddings to downstream logits, and use this view to design a structured reparameterization that models shared semantic components and class-specific differences. RVP uses only a single visual prompt and can be reparameterized at inference into a frozen backbone followed by a linear classifier, incurring nearly zero computational overhead. Across 11 few-shot classification benchmarks and four CLIP backbones, RVP consistently improves over prior visual reprogramming methods with comparable or better inference efficiency.