Dual Memory Networks: A Versatile Adaptation Approach for
  Vision-Language Models
Yabin Zhang Wenjie Zhu Hui Tang Zhiyuan Ma Kaiyang Zhou Lei Zhang
With the emergence of pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, how to
adapt them to various downstream classification tasks has garnered significant
attention in recent research. The adaptation strategies can be typically
categorized into three paradigms: zero-shot adaptation, few-shot adaptation,
and the recently-proposed training-free few-shot adaptation. Most existing
approaches are tailored for a specific setting and can only cater to one or two
of these paradigms. In this paper, we introduce a versatile adaptation approach
that can effectively work under all three settings. Specifically, we propose
the dual memory networks that comprise dynamic and static memory components.
The static memory caches training data knowledge, enabling training-free
few-shot adaptation, while the dynamic memory preserves historical test
features online during the testing process, allowing for the exploration of
additional data insights beyond the training set. This novel capability
enhances model performance in the few-shot setting and enables model usability
in the absence of training data. The two memory networks employ the same
flexible memory interactive strategy, which can operate in a training-free mode
and can be further enhanced by incorporating learnable projection layers. Our
approach is tested across 11 datasets under the three task settings.
Remarkably, in the zero-shot scenario, it outperforms existing methods by over
3\% and even shows superior results against methods utilizing external training
data. Additionally, our method exhibits robust performance against natural
distribution shifts. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/YBZh/DMN}.