# Feature Projection Learning for Better Vision-Language Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20224/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 18 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## 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, 18 of 18)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07511/) (2022)
- [Tip-Adapter: Training-free Adaption of CLIP for Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09519/) (2022)
- [Prompt-aligned Gradient for Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14865/) (2022)
- [Task Residual for Tuning Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10277/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Classification with Feature Map Reconstruction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01506/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Pre-Trained models, notably CLIP, that utilize contrastive learning have proven highly adept at extracting generalizable visual features. To inherit the well-learned knowledge of VLP models for downstream tasks, several approaches aim to adapt them efficiently with limited supervision. However, these methods either suffer from limited performance, excessive learnable parameters, or extended training times, all of which hinder their effectiveness in adapting the CLIP model to downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a simple yet efficient and effective method called textitFeature Projection Learning(FPL) to address these problems. Specifically, we develop a projection model that projects class prototype features into the query image feature space and reconstructs the query image feature map. The negative average squared reconstruction error is used as the class score. In this way, we transform the classification problem into a feature projection problem. The final output of this method is a combination of the prediction from the projection model and the original pre-trained CLIP. Comprehensive empirical evaluations confirm that FPL delivers superior accuracy, surpassing the current state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin.