DARA: Domain- and Relation-Aware Adapters Make Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Visual Grounding

Visual grounding (VG) is a challenging task to localize an object in an image based on a textual description. Recent surge in the scale of VG models has substantially improved performance, but also introduced a significant burden on computational costs during fine-tuning. In this paper, we explore applying parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) to efficiently transfer the pre-trained vision-language knowledge to VG. Specifically, we propose DARA, a novel PETL method comprising Domain-aware Adapters (DA Adapters) and Relation-aware Adapters (RA Adapters) for VG. DA Adapters first transfer intra-modality representations to be more fine-grained for the VG domain. Then RA Adapters share weights to bridge the relation between two modalities, improving spatial reasoning. Empirical results on widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that DARA achieves the best accuracy while saving numerous updated parameters compared to the full fine-tuning and other PETL methods. Notably, with only 2.13% tunable backbone parameters, DARA improves average accuracy by 0.81% across the three benchmarks compared to the baseline model. Our code is available at https://github.com/liuting20/DARA.