Papers › Less is More: Removing Text-regions Improves CLIP Training Efficiency and Robustness

Less is More: Removing Text-regions Improves CLIP Training Efficiency and Robustness

8 May 2023arXiv:2305.05095archive 2025-07-28

Liangliang Cao, BoWen Zhang, Chen Chen, Yinfei Yang, Xianzhi Du, Wencong Zhang, Zhiyun Lu, Yantao Zheng

The CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) model and its variants are becoming the de facto backbone in many applications. However, training a CLIP model from hundreds of millions of image-text pairs can be prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the conventional CLIP model doesn't differentiate between the visual semantics and meaning of text regions embedded in images. This can lead to non-robustness when the text in the embedded region doesn't match the image's visual appearance. In this paper, we discuss two effective approaches to improve the efficiency and robustness of CLIP training: (1) augmenting the training dataset while maintaining the same number of optimization steps, and (2) filtering out samples that contain text regions in the image. By doing so, we significantly improve the classification and retrieval accuracy on public benchmarks like ImageNet and CoCo. Filtering out images with text regions also protects the model from typographic attacks. To verify this, we build a new dataset named ImageNet with Adversarial Text Regions (ImageNet-Attr). Our filter-based CLIP model demonstrates a top-1 accuracy of 68.78\%, outperforming previous models whose accuracy was all below 50\%.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

apple/axlearn officialjax report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Adversarial TextRetrieval

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

ImageNet-Atr

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

CLIP

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections