Benchmarking Zero-Shot Recognition with Vision-Language Models: Challenges on Granularity and Specificity

Zhenlin Xu, Yi Zhu, Siqi Deng, Abhay Mittal, Yanbei Chen, Manchen Wang, Paolo Favaro, Joseph Tighe, Davide Modolo; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2024, pp. 1827-1836

This paper presents novel benchmarks for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) in zero-shot recognition focusing on granularity and specificity. Although VLMs excel in tasks like image captioning they face challenges in open-world settings. Our benchmarks test VLMs' consistency in understanding concepts across semantic granularity levels and their response to varying text specificity. Findings show that VLMs favor moderately fine-grained concepts and struggle with specificity often misjudging texts that differ from their training data. Extensive evaluations reveal limitations in current VLMs particularly in distinguishing between correct and subtly incorrect descriptions. While fine-tuning offers some improvements it doesn't fully address these issues highlighting the need for VLMs with enhanced generalization capabilities for real-world applications. This study provides insights into VLM limitations and suggests directions for developing more robust models.