The emergence of large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) represents a paradigm shift in machine learning, with unprecedented results in a broad span of visual recognition tasks. CLIP, one of the most popular VLMs, has exhibited remarkable zero-shot and transfer learning capabilities in classification. To transfer CLIP to downstream tasks, adapters constitute a parameter-efficient approach that avoids backpropagation through the large model (unlike related prompt learning methods). However, CLIP adapters have been developed to target discriminative performance, and the quality of their uncertainty estimates has been overlooked. In this work we show that the discriminative performance of state-of-the-art CLIP adapters does not always correlate with their uncertainty estimation capabilities, which are essential for a safe deployment in real-world scenarios. We also demonstrate that one of such adapters is obtained through MAP inference from a more general probabilistic framework. Based on this observation we introduce BayesAdapter, which leverages Bayesian inference to estimate a full probability distribution instead of a single point, better capturing the variability inherent in the parameter space. In a comprehensive empirical evaluation we show that our approach obtains high quality uncertainty estimates in the predictions, standing out in calibration and selective classification. Our code will be publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.

Despite their theoretical appealingness, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) are falling far behind in terms of adoption in real-world applications compared with deterministic NNs, mainly due to their limited scalability in training and low fidelity in uncertainty estimates. In this work, we develop a new framework, named BayesAdapter, to address these issues and bring Bayesian deep learning to the masses. The core notion of BayesAdapter is to adapt pre-trained deterministic NNs to be BNNs via Bayesian fine-tuning. We implement Bayesian fine-tuning with a plug-and-play instantiation of stochastic variational inference, and propose exemplar reparameterization to reduce gradient variance and stabilize the finetuning. Together, they enable training BNNs as if one were training deterministic NNs with minimal added overheads. During Bayesian fine-tuning, we further propose an uncertainty regularization to supervise and calibrate the uncertainty quantification of learned BNNs at low cost. To empirically evaluate BayesAdapter, we conduct extensive experiments on a diverse set of challenging benchmarks, and observe satisfactory training efficiency, competitive predictive performance, and calibrated and faithful uncertainty estimates. Much effort has been devoted to developing flexible and efficient Bayesian deep models to make accurate, robust, and well-calibrated decisions (MacKay, 1992; Neal, 1995; Graves, 2011; Blundell et al., 2015), with Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) as popular examples.