Improved Zero-Shot Classification by Adapting VLMs with Text Descriptions

Oindrila Saha, Grant Van Horn, Subhransu Maji; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 17542-17552

The zero-shot performance of existing vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP is limited by the availability of large-scale aligned image and text datasets in specific domains. In this work we leverage two complementary sources of information -- descriptions of categories generated by large language models (LLMs) and abundant fine-grained image classification datasets -- to improve the zero-shot classification performance of VLMs across fine-grained domains. On the technical side we develop methods to train VLMs with this "bag-level" image-text supervision. We find that simply using these attributes at test-time does not improve performance but our training strategy for example on the iNaturalist dataset leads to an average improvement of 4-5% in zero-shot classification accuracy for novel categories of birds and flowers. Similar improvements are observed in domains where a subset of the categories was used to fine-tune the model. By prompting LLMs in various ways we generate descriptions that capture visual appearance habitat and geographic regions and pair them with existing attributes such as the taxonomic structure of the categories. We systematically evaluate their ability to improve zero-shot categorization in natural domains. Our findings suggest that geographic priors can be just as effective and are complementary to visual appearance. Our method also outperforms prior work on prompt-based tuning of VLMs. We release the benchmark consisting of 14 datasets at https://github.com/cvl-umass/AdaptCLIPZS which will contribute to future research in zero-shot recognition.