# Tree of Attributes Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11201 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11201/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 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 54 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 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 54)

- [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)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (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)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [Prompt-aligned Gradient for Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14865/) (2022)
- [Visual Classification via Description from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07183/) (2022)
- [Language in a Bottle: Language Model Guided Concept Bottlenecks for Interpretable Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11158/) (2022)
- [Self-regulating Prompts: Foundational Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06948/) (2023)
- [What does a platypus look like? Generating customized prompts for zero-shot image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03320/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04394/) (2017)
- [Prompt Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03340/) (2022)
- [Fine-tuned CLIP Models are Efficient Video Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03640/) (2022)
- [Neural Prompt Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04673/) (2022)
- [Waffling around for Performance: Visual Classification with Random Words and Broad Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07282/) (2023)
- [CHiLS: Zero-Shot Image Classification with Hierarchical Label Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02551/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [4D LangSplat: 4D Language Gaussian Splatting via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10437/) (2025)
- [Advancing Textual Prompt Learning with Anchored Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09442/) (2024)
- [Prompt Tuning for CLIP on the Pretrained Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19198/) (2026)
- [Decomposing Visual Classification: Assessing Tree-Based Reasoning in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09732/) (2025)
- [GA2-CLIP: Generic Attribute Anchor for Efficient Prompt Tuningin Video-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22125/) (2025)
- [CAPT: Confusion-Aware Prompt Tuning for Reducing Vision-Language Misalignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02557/) (2026)
- [Joint Semantic Token Selection and Prompt Optimization for Interpretable Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04425/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prompt learning has proven effective in adapting vision language models for downstream tasks. However, existing methods usually append learnable prompt tokens solely with the category names to obtain textual features, which fails to fully leverage the rich context indicated in the category name. To address this issue, we propose the Tree of Attributes Prompt learning (TAP), which first instructs LLMs to generate a tree of attributes with a "concept - attribute - description" structure for each category, and then learn the hierarchy with vision and text prompt tokens. Unlike existing methods that merely augment category names with a set of unstructured descriptions, our approach essentially distills structured knowledge graphs associated with class names from LLMs. Furthermore, our approach introduces text and vision prompts designed to explicitly learn the corresponding visual attributes, effectively serving as domain experts. Additionally, the general and diverse descriptions generated based on the class names may be wrong or absent in the specific given images. To address this misalignment, we further introduce a vision-conditional pooling module to extract instance-specific text features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the zero-shot base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, as well as few-shot classification across 11 diverse datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/HHenryD/TAP.