{"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/text-to-image-diffusion-models-are-zero-shot","title":"Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Classifiers","arxiv_id":"2303.15233","date":"2023-03-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kevin Clark","Priyank Jaini"],"abstract":"The excellent generative capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models suggest they learn informative representations of image-text data. However, what knowledge their representations capture is not fully understood, and they have not been thoroughly explored on downstream tasks. We investigate diffusion models by proposing a method for evaluating them as zero-shot classifiers. The key idea is using a diffusion model's ability to denoise a noised image given a text description of a label as a proxy for that label's likelihood. We apply our method to Stable Diffusion and Imagen, using it to probe fine-grained aspects of the models' knowledge and comparing them with CLIP's zero-shot abilities. They perform competitively with CLIP on a wide range of zero-shot image classification datasets. Additionally, they achieve state-of-the-art results on shape/texture bias tests and can successfully perform attribute binding while CLIP cannot. Although generative pre-training is prevalent in NLP, visual foundation models often use other methods such as contrastive learning. Based on our findings, we argue that generative pre-training should be explored as a compelling alternative for vision-language tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15233v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.15233v2.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":"text-to-image-diffusion-models-are-zero-shot","repo_url":"https://github.com/LiYinqi/DIVE","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"attribute","task_name":"Attribute"},{"task_slug":"contrastive-learning","task_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"zero-shot-image-classification","task_name":"Zero-Shot Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"clip","method_name":"CLIP"},{"method_slug":"diffusion","method_name":"Diffusion"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2303.15233","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}