Towards Calibrating Prompt Tuning of Vision- Language Models

Ashshak Sharifdeen, Fahad Shamshad, Muhammad Akhtar Munir, Abhishek Basu, Mohamed Ismithdeen, Jeyapriyan Jeyamohan, Chathurika Silva, Karthik Nandakumar, Muhammad Haris Khan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 39131-39140

Prompt tuning of large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP enables efficienttask adaptation without updating model weights. However, it often leads to poorconfidence calibration and unreliable predictive uncertainty. We address thisproblem by proposing a calibration framework that enhances predictive reliabilitywhile preserving the geometry of the pretrained CLIP embedding space, which isrequired for robust generalization. Our approach extends the standard cross-entropyloss with two complementary regularizers: (1) a mean-variance margin penalty thatstabilizes inter-class logit margins by maximizing their average while minimizingdispersion, mitigating underconfidence and overconfidence spikes; and (2) a textmoment-matching loss that aligns the first and second moments of tuned textembeddings with their frozen CLIP counterparts, preserving semantic dispersioncrucial for generalization. Through extensive experiments across 7 prompt-tuningmethods and 11 diverse datasets, we demonstrate that our approach significantlyreduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) compared to competitive calibrationtechniques on both base and novel classes.