Adaptive Data Augmentation with Multi-armed Bandit: Sample-Efficient Embedding Calibration for Implicit Pattern Recognition

Training-free few-shot adaptation methods have gained significant attention recently in the context of Vision-language Models (VLMs). Yet, current benchmarks rely on strong assumptions about the statistics of the adaptation data, e.g., class balance. We question these simplifying assumptions and introduce a more realistic benchmark that varies both the levels of class balance and the effective number of classes in few-shot tasks via Dirichlet sampling. Surprisingly, under our setting, we observe substantial drops in the performances of state-of-the-art methods, more so when the number of labeled samples increases. To mitigate this, we introduce PRiSM, a class-prototype regularization that can be deployed as a plug and play module on top of any existing baseline method, significantly improving performances. Our method optimizes a novel multi-term loss, which includes a regularizer maximizing inter-class pairwise distances, along with additional terms promoting support-feature alignment and fidelity to the baseline prototypes. Furthermore, we introduce an effective and computationally efficient block Majorize-Minimize optimizer for our objective. More specifically, we derive a valid blockwise Lipschitz constant (i.e., a bound on the Hessian's spectral norm), which can be computed efficiently via the Gershgorin circle theorem. Extensive experiments show that PRiSM improves several training-free baselines, with large gains when dealing with severe class imbalance and high numbers of classes.

Pretrained biomedical vision-language models achieve strong zero-shot performance in biomedical image classification. However, downstream biomedical classification often depends on subtle visual differences between classes that may not be fully captured by pretrained representations. Few-shot adaptation addresses this mismatch by optimizing a task-specific predictor on a small labeled support set. Because the selected examples capture only part of the visual variation within the target classes, the adapted predictions can depend strongly on their composition. We propose Prompt-Anchored Residual Adaptation (PARA), which retains the frozen prompt prediction as a support-invariant semantic anchor and incorporates a visual prediction learned from the support set through an anchor-relative residual. The residual step is computed in a closed form from frozen support embeddings using anchor discrepancy and support agreement. Support-set dependence also limits evaluation: comparisons are fair within a shared draw but remain conditional on its composition. To obtain more reliable comparisons, we introduce a repeated-support protocol that separates support-selection variation from optimization randomness and reports both average and worst-20% performance. PARA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both few-shot classification and base-to-novel generalization.

The adaptation of large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP to downstream tasks with extremely limited data -- specifically in the one-shot regime -- is often hindered by a significant "Stability-Plasticity" dilemma. While efficient caching mechanisms have been introduced by training-free methods such as Tip-Adapter, these approaches often function as local Nadaraya-Watson estimators. Such estimators are characterized by inherent boundary bias and a lack of global structural regularization. In this paper, ReHARK (Refined Hybrid Adaptive RBF Kernels) is proposed as a synergistic training-free framework that reinterprets few-shot adaptation through global proximal regularization in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). A multistage refinement pipeline is introduced, consisting of: (1) Hybrid Prior Construction, where zero-shot textual knowledge from CLIP and GPT-3 is fused with visual class prototypes to form a robust semantic-visual anchor; (2) Support Set Augmentation (Bridging), where intermediate samples are generated to smooth the transition between visual and textual modalities; (3) Adaptive Distribution Rectification, where test feature statistics are aligned with the augmented support set to mitigate domain shifts; and (4) Multi-Scale RBF Kernels, where an ensemble of kernels is employed to capture complex feature geometries across diverse scales. Superior stability and accuracy are demonstrated through extensive experiments on 11 diverse benchmarks. A new state-of-the-art for one-shot adaptation is established by ReHARK, which achieves an average accuracy of 65.83%, significantly outperforming existing baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/Jahid12012021/ReHARK.