Enhancing CLIP with GPT-4: Harnessing Visual Descriptions as Prompts

Mayug Maniparambil, Chris Vorster, Derek Molloy, Noel Murphy, Kevin McGuinness, Noel E. O'Connor; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2023, pp. 262-271

Contrastive pretrained large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have revolutionized visual representation learning by providing good performance on downstream datasets. VLMs are 0-shot adapted to a downstream dataset by designing prompts that are relevant to the dataset. Such prompt engineering makes use of domain expertise and a validation dataset. Meanwhile, recent developments in generative pretrained models like GPT-4 mean they can be used as advanced internet search tools. They can also be manipulated to provide visual information in any structure. In this work, we show that GPT-4 can be used to generate text that is visually descriptive and how this can be used to adapt CLIP to downstream tasks. We show considerable improvements in 0-shot transfer accuracy on specialized fine-grained datasets like EuroSAT ( 7%), DTD ( 7%), SUN397 ( 4.6%), and CUB ( 3.3%) when compared to CLIP's default prompt. We also design a simple few-shot adapter that learns to choose the best possible sentences to construct generalizable classifiers that outperform the recently proposed CoCoOP by ( 2%) on average and by over (4%) on 4 specialized fine-grained datasets. The code, prompts, and auxiliary text dataset is available at https://github.com/mayug/VDT-Adapter github.com/mayug/VDT-Adapter.