# Text as Image: Learning Transferable Adapter for Multi-Label Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04160 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04160/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (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 35 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/prompt-learning-and-adaptation-of-clip/)

## 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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14119/) (2020)
- [Multi-Label Image Recognition with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03582/) (2019)
- [Recognize Anything: A Strong Image Tagging Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03514/) (2023)
- [A disciplined approach to neural network hyper-parameters: Part 1 -- learning rate, batch size, momentum, and weight decay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09820/) (2018)
- [CNN-RNN: A Unified Framework for Multi-label Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04573/) (2016)
- [Query2Label: A Simple Transformer Way to Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10834/) (2021)
- [Learning a Deep ConvNet for Multi-label Classification with Partial Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09720/) (2019)
- [Learning Semantic-Specific Graph Representation for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07325/) (2019)
- [DualCoOp: Fast Adaptation to Multi-Label Recognition with Limited Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09541/) (2022)
- [Tag2Text: Guiding Vision-Language Model via Image Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05657/) (2023)
- [Multi-label Image Recognition by Recurrently Discovering Attentional Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02816/) (2017)
- [Attention-Driven Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02994/) (2020)
- [Cross-Modality Attention with Semantic Graph Embedding for Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07872/) (2019)
- [ML-Decoder: Scalable and Versatile Classification Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12933/) (2021)
- [CNN: Single-label to Multi-label](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.5726/) (2014)
- [Residual Attention: A Simple but Effective Method for Multi-Label Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02456/) (2021)
- [Texts as Images in Prompt Tuning for Multi-Label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12739/) (2022)
- [Orderless Recurrent Models for Multi-label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09996/) (2019)
- [Recurrent Attentional Reinforcement Learning for Multi-label Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07465/) (2017)
- [Structured Semantic Transfer for Multi-Label Recognition with Partial Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10941/) (2021)
- [LaSO: Label-Set Operations networks for multi-label few-shot learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09811/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [TAI++: Text as Image for Multi-Label Image Classification by Co-Learning Transferable Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06926/) (2024)
- [Query-Based Knowledge Sharing for Open-Vocabulary Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01181/) (2024)
- [SPARC: Score Prompting and Adaptive Fusion for Zero-Shot Multi-Label Recognition in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16911/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pre-trained vision-language models have notably accelerated progress of open-world concept recognition. Their impressive zero-shot ability has recently been transferred to multi-label image classification via prompt tuning, enabling to discover novel labels in an open-vocabulary manner. However, this paradigm suffers from non-trivial training costs, and becomes computationally prohibitive for a large number of candidate labels. To address this issue, we note that vision-language pre-training aligns images and texts in a unified embedding space, making it potential for an adapter network to identify labels in visual modality while be trained in text modality. To enhance such cross-modal transfer ability, a simple yet effective method termed random perturbation is proposed, which enables the adapter to search for potential visual embeddings by perturbing text embeddings with noise during training, resulting in better performance in visual modality. Furthermore, we introduce an effective approach to employ large language models for multi-label instruction-following text generation. In this way, a fully automated pipeline for visual label recognition is developed without relying on any manual data. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show the superiority of our method in various multi-label classification tasks.