{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/image-caption-encoding-for-improving-zero","title":"Image-Caption Encoding for Improving Zero-Shot Generalization","arxiv_id":"2402.02662","date":"2024-02-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Eric Yang Yu","Christopher Liao","Sathvik Ravi","Theodoros Tsiligkaridis","Brian Kulis"],"abstract":"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 data point 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. Our code: https://github.com/Chris210634/ice","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02662v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.02662v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"image-caption-encoding-for-improving-zero","repo_url":"https://github.com/chris210634/ice","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"zero-shot-image-classification","task_name":"Zero-Shot Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"zero-shot-generalization","task_name":"Zero-shot Generalization"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}