Image-Caption Encoding for Improving Zero-Shot Generalization

Eric Yu, Christopher Liao, Sathvik Ravi, Theodoros Tsiligkaridis, Brian Kulis; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 6977-6986

Recent advances in vision-language models have combined contrastive approaches with generative methods to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) on downstream inference tasks like zero-shot image classification. However a persistent issue of these models for image classification is their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization capabilities. We first show that when an OOD datapoint is misclassified the correct class can be typically found in the Top-K predicted classes. In order to steer the model prediction toward the correct class within the top predicted classes we propose the Image-Caption Encoding (ICE) method a straightforward approach that directly enforces consistency between the image-conditioned and caption-conditioned predictions at evaluation time only. Intuitively we take advantage of unique properties of the generated captions to guide our local search for the correct class label within the Top-K predicted classes. We show that our method can be easily combined with other SOTA methods to enhance Top-1 OOD accuracies by 0.5% on average and up to 3% on challenging datasets.