Zero-shot Classification with Vision-Language Models Leveraging Unlabeled Data through Label Propagation

Core Concepts

By leveraging the inherent structure of unlabeled data through label propagation, the proposed ZLaP method can significantly improve the zero-shot classification performance of vision-language models in both transductive and inductive inference setups.

Abstract

The paper addresses the problem of zero-shot classification with vision-language models, where the goal is to classify images into a set of known classes without access to any labeled training data. The authors propose a method called ZLaP that leverages the structure of unlabeled data through label propagation to improve the zero-shot performance of vision-language models.
Key highlights:

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown impressive zero-shot classification performance using only class names as input. However, the authors aim to further improve this performance by utilizing unlabeled data.
The authors introduce ZLaP, a label propagation-based method that captures the geodesic similarities between unlabeled images and class representations in the VLM feature space.
To adapt label propagation to the bi-modal nature of VLMs, the authors propose separate nearest neighbor search for image-image and image-text connections, as well as a power function to balance the contributions.
ZLaP can perform both transductive and inductive zero-shot inference, with an efficient dual solution and sparsification technique for the inductive case.
Extensive experiments on 14 datasets show that ZLaP significantly outperforms existing zero-shot methods, and further gains can be achieved by combining it with class proxies from the concurrent InMaP approach.
The authors also demonstrate the effectiveness of ZLaP when using prompts generated by large language models, as well as its applicability to multi-label classification.

Stats

"Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on zero-shot classification, i.e. classification when provided merely with a list of class names."
"We leverage the graph structure of the unlabeled data and introduce ZLaP, a method based on label propagation (LP) that utilizes geodesic distances for classification."
"We tailor LP to graphs containing both text and image features and further propose an efficient method for performing inductive inference based on a dual solution and a sparsification step."

Quotes

"Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a variety of computer vision tasks."
"Besides using the visual encoder in isolation, the joint text and visual encoder feature space of VLMs enables us to define text-based "classifiers", e.g. using the class names as textual prompts."
"We leverage the inherent structure of the unlabeled data represented by a proximity graph and apply label propagation (LP) between the text-based classifiers and unlabeled images to derive geodesic distances we then use for classification."

Key Insights Distilled From

Label Propagation for Zero-shot Classification with Vision-Language Models

by Vlad... at arxiv.org 04-08-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.04072.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can the proposed ZLaP method be extended to handle more complex relationships between classes, such as hierarchical or compositional structures

The ZLaP method can be extended to handle more complex relationships between classes by incorporating hierarchical or compositional structures into the graph representation. For hierarchical relationships, class nodes can be organized in a tree-like structure where parent nodes represent broader categories and child nodes represent more specific subcategories. By considering the relationships between these nodes in the graph construction, ZLaP can propagate labels more effectively, taking into account the hierarchical nature of the classes.
For compositional structures, where classes can be composed of multiple subparts or attributes, ZLaP can incorporate additional edges in the graph to capture these relationships. Each subpart or attribute can be represented as a node connected to the main class node, allowing for the propagation of information about the composition of classes. By considering these complex relationships in the graph, ZLaP can improve zero-shot classification by leveraging the rich semantic information encoded in the class structures.

What are the potential limitations of using unlabeled data from the web, as opposed to the target distribution, and how can these be addressed

Using unlabeled data from the web instead of the target distribution can introduce several limitations. One limitation is the potential presence of noise or irrelevant images in the web-crawled dataset, which can negatively impact the performance of zero-shot classification models. To address this limitation, preprocessing steps such as filtering out irrelevant images or using more sophisticated data selection techniques can be employed to ensure the quality of the unlabeled data.
Another limitation is the distributional shift between the web-crawled data and the target distribution, which can lead to domain adaptation challenges. To mitigate this limitation, techniques such as domain adaptation or data augmentation can be applied to align the distributions of the unlabeled data with the target distribution. Additionally, incorporating domain adaptation methods within the ZLaP framework can help improve the generalization of the model to unseen data.

Given the success of ZLaP in improving zero-shot classification, how might it be applied to other tasks that involve bridging the gap between textual and visual representations, such as visual question answering or image captioning

The success of ZLaP in improving zero-shot classification can be applied to other tasks that involve bridging the gap between textual and visual representations, such as visual question answering (VQA) or image captioning. In VQA, ZLaP can be used to propagate information between textual questions and visual features, enabling the model to better understand the relationships between the two modalities and generate accurate answers. By incorporating the graph-based label propagation approach of ZLaP, VQA models can benefit from enhanced contextual understanding and improved performance.
Similarly, in image captioning tasks, ZLaP can facilitate the generation of more descriptive and contextually relevant captions by leveraging the relationships between visual features and textual descriptions. By propagating information through the graph structure that captures the interactions between image and text features, ZLaP can enhance the quality and coherence of generated captions. This application of ZLaP can lead to more accurate and semantically rich image descriptions in image captioning systems.