# Tuning Vision-Language Models with Candidate Labels by Prompt Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07638 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07638/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 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 37 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 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 37)

- [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)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Few-Shot Image Classification: a Good Embedding Is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11539/) (2020)
- [Tip-Adapter: Training-free CLIP-Adapter for Better Vision-Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03930/) (2021)
- [Prompt-aligned Gradient for Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14865/) (2022)
- [CPT: Colorful Prompt Tuning for Pre-trained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11797/) (2021)
- [Scaling Down to Scale Up: A Guide to Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15647/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03649/) (2022)
- [Progressive Identification of True Labels for Partial-Label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08053/) (2020)
- [Provably Consistent Partial-Label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08929/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [VistaWise: Building Cost-Effective Agent with Cross-Modal Knowledge Graph for Minecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18722/) (2025)
- [ContextNav: Towards Agentic Multimodal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04560/) (2025)
- [VideoStir: Understanding Long Videos via Spatio-Temporally Structured and Intent-Aware RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05418/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Attention Purification for Backdoored Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12989/) (2026)
- [CogniVerse: Revolutionizing Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Cognitive Reflection and Geometric Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29602/) (2026)
- [V-DEAL: Diagnosing Video Safety De-Calibration as an Understanding-Refusal Coupling Failure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21151/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language models (VLMs) can learn high-quality representations from a large-scale training dataset of image-text pairs. Prompt learning is a popular approach to fine-tuning VLM to adapt them to downstream tasks. Despite the satisfying performance, a major limitation of prompt learning is the demand for labelled data. In real-world scenarios, we may only obtain candidate labels (where the true label is included) instead of the true labels due to data privacy or sensitivity issues. In this paper, we provide the first study on prompt learning with candidate labels for VLMs. We empirically demonstrate that prompt learning is more advantageous than other fine-tuning methods, for handling candidate labels. Nonetheless, its performance drops when the label ambiguity increases. In order to improve its robustness, we propose a simple yet effective framework that better leverages the prior knowledge of VLMs to guide the learning process with candidate labels. Specifically, our framework disambiguates candidate labels by aligning the model output with the mixed class posterior jointly predicted by both the learnable and the handcrafted prompt. Besides, our framework can be equipped with various off-the-shelf training objectives for learning with candidate labels to further improve their performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.