# Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02959/

## 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 28 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 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, 28 of 28)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07511/) (2022)
- [PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07441/) (2019)
- [Coordinate Descent Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.04759/) (2015)
- [Can AI help in screening Viral and COVID-19 pneumonia?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13145/) (2020)
- [SimpleShot: Revisiting Nearest-Neighbor Classification for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04623/) (2019)
- [Metrics reloaded: Recommendations for image analysis validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01653/) (2022)
- [Quilt-1M: One Million Image-Text Pairs for Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11207/) (2023)
- [Task Residual for Tuning Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10277/) (2022)
- [A unifying mutual information view of metric learning: cross-entropy vs. pairwise losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08983/) (2020)
- [Multimodality Helps Unimodality: Cross-Modal Few-Shot Learning with Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06267/) (2023)
- [A Foundation Language-Image Model of the Retina (FLAIR): Encoding Expert Knowledge in Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07898/) (2023)
- [No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04125/) (2024)
- [Going Deeper through the Gleason Scoring Scale: An Automatic end-to-end System for Histology Prostate Grading and Cribriform Pattern Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10490/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at the Few-Shot Adaptation of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12730/) (2023)
- [LP++: A Surprisingly Strong Linear Probe for Few-Shot CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02285/) (2024)
- [Long-Tailed Classification of Thorax Diseases on Chest X-Ray: A New Benchmark Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13365/) (2022)
- [Boosting Vision-Language Models with Transduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01837/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Adaptation of Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03868/) (2024)
- [Full Conformal Adaptation of Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06076/) (2025)
- [Few-Shot, Now for Real: Medical VLMs Adaptation without Balanced Sets or Validation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17500/) (2025)
- [A Reality Check of Vision-Language Pre-training in Radiology: Have We Progressed Using Text?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05227/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on large, heterogeneous data sources are becoming increasingly popular, providing rich multi-modal embeddings that enable efficient transfer to new tasks. A particularly relevant application is few-shot adaptation, where only a handful of annotated examples are available to adapt the model through multi-modal linear probes. In medical imaging, specialized VLMs have shown promising performance in zero- and few-shot image classification, which is valuable for mitigating the high cost of expert annotations. However, challenges remain in extremely low-shot regimes: the inherent class imbalances in medical tasks often lead to underrepresented categories, penalizing overall model performance. To address this limitation, we propose leveraging unlabeled data by introducing an efficient semi-supervised solver that propagates text-informed pseudo-labels during few-shot adaptation. The proposed method enables lower-budget annotation pipelines for adapting VLMs, reducing labeling effort by >50% in low-shot regimes.