Supporting Vision-Language Model Inference with Confounder-pruning Knowledge Prompt
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP
Abstract (arXiv)
Vision-language models are pre-trained by aligning image-text pairs in a common space to deal with open-set visual concepts. To boost the transferability of the pre-trained models, recent works adopt fixed or learnable prompts, i.e., classification weights are synthesized from natural language describing task-relevant categories, to reduce the gap between tasks in the training and test phases. However, how and what prompts can improve inference performance remains unclear. In this paper, we explicitly clarify the importance of including semantic information in prompts, while existing prompting methods generate prompts without exploring the semantic information of textual labels. Manually constructing prompts with rich semantics requires domain expertise and is extremely time-consuming. To cope with this issue, we propose a semantic-aware prompt learning method, namely CPKP, which retrieves an ontological knowledge graph by treating the textual label as a query to extract task-relevant semantic information. CPKP further introduces a double-tier confounder-pruning procedure to refine the derived semantic information. The graph-tier confounders are gradually identified and phased out, inspired by the principle of Granger causality. The feature-tier confounders are demolished by following the maximum entropy principle in information theory. Empirically, the evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of CPKP, e.g., with two shots, CPKP outperforms the manual-prompt method by 4.64% and the learnable-prompt method by 1.09% on average, and the superiority of CPKP in domain generalization compared to benchmark approaches. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Mowenyii/CPKP.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 43 of its 71 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 May 2022.
Builds on
43 of 71 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2021Tip-Adapter: Training-free CLIP-Adapter for Better Vision-Language Modeling6 Nov
- 2021A Good Prompt Is Worth Millions of Parameters: Low-resource Prompt-based Learning for Vision-Language Models16 Oct
- 2021CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters9 Oct
- 2021Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models2 Sep
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