# TLDR: Text Based Last-layer Retraining for Debiasing Image Classifiers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18291 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18291/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02053/) (2022)
- [Just Train Twice: Improving Group Robustness without Training Group Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09044/) (2021)
- [Last Layer Re-Training is Sufficient for Robustness to Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02937/) (2022)
- [No Subclass Left Behind: Fine-Grained Robustness in Coarse-Grained Classification Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12945/) (2020)
- [Simple data balancing achieves competitive worst-group-accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14503/) (2021)
- [Correct-N-Contrast: A Contrastive Approach for Improving Robustness to Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01517/) (2022)
- [Domino: Discovering Systematic Errors with Cross-Modal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14960/) (2022)
- [Spread Spurious Attribute: Improving Worst-group Accuracy with Spurious Attribute Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02070/) (2022)
- [DeCap: Decoding CLIP Latents for Zero-Shot Captioning via Text-Only Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03032/) (2023)
- [Simple and Fast Group Robustness by Automatic Feature Reweighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11074/) (2023)
- [Text-To-Concept (and Back) via Cross-Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06386/) (2023)
- [The Spotlight: A General Method for Discovering Systematic Errors in Deep Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00758/) (2021)
- [PromptStyler: Prompt-driven Style Generation for Source-free Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15199/) (2023)
- [Diagnosing and Rectifying Vision Models using Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04269/) (2023)
- [Towards Last-layer Retraining for Group Robustness with Fewer Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08534/) (2023)
- [Grounding Visual Representations with Texts for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10285/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Intermediate Layer Classifiers for OOD generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05461/) (2025)
- [On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Last-layer Retraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01766/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An image classifier may depend on incidental features stemming from a strong correlation between the feature and the classification target in the training dataset. Recently, Last Layer Retraining (LLR) with group-balanced datasets is shown to be efficient in mitigating the spurious correlation of classifiers. However, the acquisition of image-based group-balanced datasets is costly, which hinders the general applicability of the LLR method. In this work, we propose to perform LLR based on text datasets built with large language models to debias a general image classifier. To that end, we demonstrate that text can generally be a proxy for its corresponding image beyond the image-text joint embedding space, which is achieved with a linear projector that ensures orthogonality between its weight and the modality gap of the joint embedding space. In addition, we propose a systematic validation procedure that checks whether the generated words are compatible with the embedding space of CLIP and the image classifier, which is shown to be effective for improving debiasing performance. We dub these procedures as TLDR (Text-based Last layer retraining for Debiasing image classifieRs) and show our method achieves the performance that is competitive with the LLR methods that require group-balanced image dataset for retraining. Furthermore, TLDR outperforms other baselines that involve training the last layer without any group annotated dataset. Codes: https://github.com/beotborry/TLDR