← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.11152 · v1
Full Fine-Tuning is not the Problem: Why Adam Fails and SGD Succeeds in Few-Shot CLIP Adaptation
首次提交 2026-11-08 13:47
版本更新 2026-11-08 13:47
雷达观测 2026-11-10 12:16
摘要
Few-shot CLIP adaptation is often treated as a parameterization problem. Full fine-tuning is assumed to overfit, so parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are preferred. In this paper, we show that this conclusion conflates parameterization with optimization. Across 11 datasets, 3 CLIP backbones, and 5 shot levels, dense full fine-tuning with plain SGD outperforms representative PEFT methods under the reported evaluation protocol, whereas Adam/AdamW collapses. We trace this collapse to unreliable support-set preconditioning. The few-shot second moment systematically underestimates the corresponding full-data statistic, already at initialization. Adam's inverse-square-root normalization converts this error into an oversized adaptive update. Matching Adam's first-step update budget to SGD resolves most of the collapse, whereas numerator-side alignment does not explain the failure. Shampoo and SOAP also fail, so richer preconditioning alone does not resolve the problem. Theory formalizes how few-shot estimation error is amplified into unsafe updates. SGD succeeds because it avoids unreliable preconditioners and stays close to pretrained CLIP. Interpolation probes show low-loss connections along tested directions, and curvature probes show favorable directional curvature. These results identify optimizer-induced preconditioning, not dense full fine-tuning itself, as the main source of failure in few-shot CLIP adaptation.
作者备注：Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
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v1 · 2026-11-08 13:47 · 最新观测版本
Full Fine-Tuning is not the Problem: Why Adam Fails and SGD Succeeds in Few-Shot CLIP Adaptation
Few-shot CLIP adaptation is often treated as a parameterization problem. Full fine-tuning is assumed to overfit, so parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are preferred. In this paper, we show that this conclusion conflates parameterization with optimization. Across 11 datasets, 3 CLIP backbones, and 5 shot levels, dense full fine-tuning with plain SGD outperforms representative PEFT methods under the reported evaluation protocol, whereas Adam/AdamW collapses. We trace this collapse to unreliable support-set preconditioning. The few-shot second moment systematically underestimates the corresponding full-data statistic, already at initialization. Adam's inverse-square-root normalization converts this error into an oversized adaptive update. Matching Adam's first-step update budget to SGD resolves most of the collapse, whereas numerator-side alignment does not explain the failure. Shampoo and SOAP also fail, so richer preconditioning alone does not resolve the problem. Theory formalizes how few-shot estimation error is amplified into unsafe updates. SGD succeeds because it avoids unreliable preconditioners and stays close to pretrained CLIP. Interpolation probes show low-loss connections along tested directions, and curvature probes show favorable directional curvature. These results identify optimizer-induced preconditioning, not dense full fine-tuning itself, as the main source of failure in few-shot CLIP adaptation.
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