# In-context Prompt Learning for Test-time Vision Recognition with Frozen Vision-language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06126 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06126/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 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 39 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2024.

## 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 39)

- [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)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [FILIP: Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07783/) (2021)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [MetaICL: Learning to Learn In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15943/) (2021)
- [Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07511/) (2022)
- [Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Minimax Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06487/) (2019)
- [Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02499/) (2022)
- [Exploring Visual Prompts for Adapting Large-Scale Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17274/) (2022)
- [Self-regulating Prompts: Foundational Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06948/) (2023)
- [Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06991/) (2022)
- [Simultaneous Deep Transfer Across Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.02192/) (2015)
- [Self-Adaptive In-Context Learning: An Information Compression Perspective for In-Context Example Selection and Ordering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10375/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Adapting Vision-Language Models Without Labels: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05547/) (2025)
- [Language-Driven Visual Consensus for Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08426/) (2024)
- [Taming Visual Neglect: A Variational Information Bottleneck Framework for Adaptive Attention in Multimodal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23570/) (2026)
- [ProCAP: Probabilistic Cross-Attentive Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30434/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities across various downstream tasks. However, their performance significantly degrades when test inputs exhibit different distributions. In this paper, we explore the concept of test-time prompt tuning (TTPT), which facilitates the adaptation of the CLIP model to novel downstream tasks through a one-step unsupervised optimization that involves only test samples. Inspired by in-context learning in natural language processing (NLP), we propose In-Context Prompt Learning (InCPL) for test-time visual recognition tasks, which empowers a pre-trained vision-language model with labeled examples as context information on downstream task. Specifically, InCPL associates a new test sample with very few labeled examples (sometimes just one) as context information, enabling reliable label estimation for the test sample and facilitating model adaptation. To achieve this, InCPL employs an efficient language-to-vision translator to explore the textual prior information for visual prompt learning. Further, we introduce a context-aware unsupervised loss to optimize visual prompts tailored to test samples. Finally, we design a cyclic learning strategy for visual and textual prompts to ensure mutual synergy across different modalities. This enables a pre-trained, frozen CLIP model to adapt to any task using its learned adaptive prompt. Our method demonstrates superior performance and achieves state-of-the-art results across various downstream datasets.