Boosting Memory Efficiency in Transfer Learning for High-Resolution Medical Image Classification

The success of large-scale pretrained models has established fine-tuning as a standard method for achieving significant improvements in downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning the entire parameter set of a pretrained model is costly. Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) has recently emerged as a cost-effective alternative for adapting pretrained models to downstream tasks. Despite its advantages, the increasing model size and input resolution present challenges for PETL, as the training memory consumption is not reduced as effectively as the parameter usage. In this article, we introduce fine-grained prompt tuning plus (FPT+), a PETL method designed for high-resolution medical image classification, which significantly reduces the training memory consumption compared to other PETL methods. FPT+ performs transfer learning by training a lightweight side network and accessing pretrained knowledge from a large pretrained model (LPM) through fine-grained prompts and fusion modules. Specifically, we freeze the LPM of interest and construct a learnable lightweight side network. The frozen LPM processes high-resolution images to extract fine-grained features, while the side network employs corresponding downsampled low-resolution images to minimize memory usage. To enable the side network to leverage pretrained knowledge, we propose fine-grained prompts and fusion modules, which collaborate to summarize information through the LPM’s intermediate activations. We evaluate FPT+ on eight medical image datasets of varying sizes, modalities, and complexities. Experimental results demonstrate that FPT+ outperforms other PETL methods, using only 1.03% of the learnable parameters and 3.18% of the memory required for fine-tuning an entire ViT-B model. Our code is available https://github.com/YijinHuang/FPT.