Multi-modal Contrastive Learning Robustness Analysis for Distribution Shift Understanding
Core Concepts
MMCL's robustness stems from intra-class contrasting and inter-class feature sharing, enhanced by rich captions.
Abstract
Abstract:
MMCL approaches like CLIP achieve robust representations against distribution shift.
Mechanisms behind MMCL's robustness: intra-class contrasting and inter-class feature sharing.
Introduction:
Challenge in ML: learning classifiers that generalize under distribution shifts.
MMCL success in zero-shot image classification due to contrastive loss alignment.
Related Works:
Studies on distribution shift and domain generalization.
Evaluation of models on natural variations in data collection sources.
Framework for Comparing MMCL and SL:
Modeling multimodal data to capture abstract notions shared among different modalities.
Multi-modal Contrastive Learning (MMCL):
Linear encoders align representations in a shared latent space using contrastive loss function.
Two Mechanisms Behind the Robustness of MMCL:
Intra-class contrasting enables learning generalizable features with high variance.
Inter-class feature sharing allows learning information about one class from another.
Understanding the Benefit of Rich Image Captions:
Varying caption richness impacts robustness, emphasizing the importance of detailed captions.
Understanding the Robustness of Multi-modal Contrastive Learning to Distribution Shift
Stats
Radford et al. (2021) have shown that models trained with CLIP exhibit better Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization compared to classifiers with equivalent In-Distribution (ID) accuracy.
The empirical investigations of Fang et al. (2022) suggest that the large diverse image training data contributes significantly to MMCL's robustness.
Quotes
"Both mechanisms prevent spurious features that are over-represented in the training data to overshadow the generalizable core features."
"Rich captions are essential for achieving robustness."