# Prompt, Generate, then Cache: Cascade of Foundation Models makes Strong Few-shot Learners

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02151 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02151/

## Key facts

- Cited by 152 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 64 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 152)

- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16199/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06435/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [MathVerse: Does Your Multi-modal LLM Truly See the Diagrams in Visual Math Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14624/) (2024)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12320/) (2023)
- [SPHINX: The Joint Mixing of Weights, Tasks, and Visual Embeddings for Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07575/) (2023)
- [Personalize Segment Anything Model with One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03048/) (2023)
- [Woodpecker: Hallucination Correction for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16045/) (2023)
- [Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18293/) (2024)
- [Domain Specialization as the Key to Make Large Language Models Disruptive: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18703/) (2023)
- [SPHINX-X: Scaling Data and Parameters for a Family of Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05935/) (2024)
- [Federated Learning for Generalization, Robustness, Fairness: A Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06750/) (2023)
- [Not All Features Matter: Enhancing Few-shot CLIP with Adaptive Prior Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01195/) (2023)
- [Marigold: Affordable Adaptation of Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09358/) (2025)
- [No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04125/) (2024)
- [ViewRefer: Grasp the Multi-view Knowledge for 3D Visual Grounding with GPT and Prototype Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16894/) (2023)
- [GraphAdapter: Tuning Vision-Language Models With Dual Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13625/) (2023)
- [On the test-time zero-shot generalization of vision-language models: Do we really need prompt learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02266/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09316/) (2023)
- [CoCoT: Contrastive Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Large Multimodal Models with Multiple Image Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02582/) (2024)
- [Referred by Multi-Modality: A Unified Temporal Transformer for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16318/) (2023)
- [Dual Memory Networks: A Versatile Adaptation Approach for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17589/) (2024)
- [Going Denser with Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11173/) (2023)
- [InstructVid2Vid: Controllable Video Editing with Natural Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12328/) (2023)
- [Point-PEFT: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for 3D Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03059/) (2023)
- [GeoGPT: Understanding and Processing Geospatial Tasks through An Autonomous GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07930/) (2023)
- [Gradient-based Parameter Selection for Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10136/) (2023)
- [LLMs Meet VLMs: Boost Open Vocabulary Object Detection with Fine-grained Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04630/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual recognition in low-data regimes requires deep neural networks to learn generalized representations from limited training samples. Recently, CLIP-based methods have shown promising few-shot performance benefited from the contrastive language-image pre-training. We then question, if the more diverse pre-training knowledge can be cascaded to further assist few-shot representation learning. In this paper, we propose CaFo, a Cascade of Foundation models that incorporates diverse prior knowledge of various pre-training paradigms for better few-shot learning. Our CaFo incorporates CLIP's language-contrastive knowledge, DINO's vision-contrastive knowledge, DALL-E's vision-generative knowledge, and GPT-3's language-generative knowledge. Specifically, CaFo works by 'Prompt, Generate, then Cache'. Firstly, we leverage GPT-3 to produce textual inputs for prompting CLIP with rich downstream linguistic semantics. Then, we generate synthetic images via DALL-E to expand the few-shot training data without any manpower. At last, we introduce a learnable cache model to adaptively blend the predictions from CLIP and DINO. By such collaboration, CaFo can fully unleash the potential of different pre-training methods and unify them to perform state-of-the-art for few-shot classification. Code is available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/CaFo.