# Feasibility with Language Models for Open-World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11181/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [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)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Ask Me Anything: A simple strategy for prompting language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02441/) (2022)
- [In-Context Impersonation Reveals Large Language Models' Strengths and Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14930/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study and Analysis of Generalized Zero-Shot Learning for Object Recognition in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04253/) (2016)
- [Task-Driven Modular Networks for Zero-Shot Compositional Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05908/) (2019)
- [Learning Graph Embeddings for Compositional Zero-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01987/) (2021)
- [Open World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12609/) (2021)
- [Symmetry and Group in Attribute-Object Compositions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00587/) (2020)
- [Learning to Compose Soft Prompts for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03574/) (2022)
- [Semantic Jitter: Dense Supervision for Visual Comparisons via Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06341/) (2016)
- [Independent Prototype Propagation for Zero-Shot Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00305/) (2021)
- [KG-SP: Knowledge Guided Simple Primitives for Open World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06784/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans can easily tell if an attribute (also called state) is realistic, i.e., feasible, for an object, e.g. fire can be hot, but it cannot be wet. In Open-World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning, when all possible state-object combinations are considered as unseen classes, zero-shot predictors tend to perform poorly. Our work focuses on using external auxiliary knowledge to determine the feasibility of state-object combinations. Our Feasibility with Language Model (FLM) is a simple and effective approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to better comprehend the semantic relationships between states and objects. FLM involves querying an LLM about the feasibility of a given pair and retrieving the output logit for the positive answer. To mitigate potential misguidance of the LLM given that many of the state-object compositions are rare or completely infeasible, we observe that the in-context learning ability of LLMs is essential. We present an extensive study identifying Vicuna and ChatGPT as best performing, and we demonstrate that our FLM consistently improves OW-CZSL performance across all three benchmarks.