Spotlighter: Revisiting Prompt Tuning from a Representative Mining View

AbstractCLIP’s success has demonstrated that prompt tuning can achieve robust cross-modal semantic alignment for tasks ranging from open-domain recognition to fine-grained classification. However, redundant or weakly relevant feature components introduce noise and incur unnecessary computational costs. In this work, we propose Spotlighter, a lightweight token-selection framework that simultaneously enhances accuracy and efficiency in prompt tuning. Spotlighter evaluates each visual token’s activation from both sample-wise and semantic-wise perspectives and retains only the top-scoring tokens for downstream prediction. A class-specific semantic memory bank of learned prototypes refines this selection, ensuring semantic representativeness and compensating for discarded features. To further prioritize informative signals, we introduce a two-level ranking mechanism that dynamically weights token–prototype interactions. Across 11 few-shot benchmarks, Spotlighter outperforms CLIP by up to 11.19% in harmonic mean accuracy and achieves up to 0.8K additional FPS, with only 21 extra parameters. These results establish Spotlighter as an effective and scalable baseline for prompt tuning.