Paper Detail

MuRA: Multi-Rank Adaptation for Efficient and Effective Test-Time Vision-Language Generalization

Gengyuan Liu, Nanzhou Wang, Chang Liu, Qinwen Wu, Zhenhao Wang, Jiacong Wang, Bokui Chen, Xiangyang Ji

arxiv Score 8.2

Published 2026-08-04 · First seen 2026-08-05

General AI

Abstract

Vision-language models exhibit remarkable zero-shot capabilities but suffer significant performance degradation under distribution shifts. While test-time adaptation (TTA) via Low-Rank Adaptation offers a parameter-efficient solution, we identify a fundamental bottleneck in current methods: the reliance on static rank configurations. Because visual inputs inherently possess varying information densities, a fixed rank forces an inevitable optimization compromise, leading to underfitting on complex scenes and overfitting on simple ones. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-Rank Adaptation (MuRA), a novel framework that dynamically selects and fuses adaptation modules of varying capacities based on token-level visual complexity. MuRA synergizes Multi-Rank Orthogonal Decomposition to provide a superior, knowledge-preserving initialization, and Unified Component Fusion with Continuous Router Updating to sustainably learn semantic-to-rank mappings. Furthermore, we provide rigorous theoretical justifications mathematically proving the necessity and gradient stability of this adaptive mechanism. Crucially, MuRA's dynamic design uniquely thrives at the deepest visual layer, capitalizing on the shortest gradient backpropagation path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MuRA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across extensive domain generalization and cross-dataset benchmarks while significantly reducing both computational and memory overhead.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
soon
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{liu2026mura,
  title = {MuRA: Multi-Rank Adaptation for Efficient and Effective Test-Time Vision-Language Generalization},
  author = {Gengyuan Liu and Nanzhou Wang and Chang Liu and Qinwen Wu and Zhenhao Wang and Jiacong Wang and Bokui Chen and Xiangyang Ji},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Vision-language models exhibit remarkable zero-shot capabilities but suffer significant performance degradation under distribution shifts. While test-time adaptation (TTA) via Low-Rank Adaptation offers a parameter-efficient solution, we identify a fundamental bottleneck in current methods: the reliance on static rank configurations. Because visual inputs inherently possess varying information densities, a fixed rank forces an inevitable optimization compromise, leading to underfitting on comple},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03885},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2608.03885},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}