Text-Guided Multi-Scale Frequency Representation Adaptation

Weicai Yan, Xinhua Ma, Wang Lin, Tao Jin


Abstract
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods introduce a small number of training parameters, enabling pre-trained models to adapt rapidly to new data distributions. While these methods have shown promising results, they exhibit notable limitations. First, most existing methods operate in the signal space domain, which results in substantial information redundancy. Second, most existing methods utilize fixed prompts or adaptation layers, failing to fully account for the multi-scale characteristics of signals. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-Scale Frequency Adapter (FreqAdapter), which integrates textual information and performs multi-scale fine-tuning of visual signal in the frequency domain. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale adaptation strategy to optimize receptive fields across different frequency ranges, further enhancing the model’s representational capacity. Extensive experiments on multimodal models, including CLIP and LLaVA, demonstrate that FreqAdapter significantly improves both performance and efficiency. FreqAdapter improves performance with minimal cost and fast convergence within one epoch.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1108
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
24169–24187
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1108/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weicai Yan, Xinhua Ma, Wang Lin, and Tao Jin. 2026. Text-Guided Multi-Scale Frequency Representation Adaptation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 24169–24187, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text-Guided Multi-Scale Frequency Representation Adaptation (Yan et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1108.pdf
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