# Unsupervised Long-Tailed Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07903 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07903/

## 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 2 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 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, 2 of 2)

- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03649/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adapting vision-language models to downstream tasks has achieved remarkable success by leveraging pseudo-labels generated from unlabeled data. Existing methods typically assume a uniform unlabeled data distribution, and thus the resulting pseudo-label distribution is likewise uniform. However, real-world data distributions are often long-tailed. To tackle this, we formalize a new scenario termed Unsupervised Long-Tailed Adaptation (ULTA). Under this scenario, existing methods exhibit a contrasting phenomenon: head-class performance drops sharply, which is distinct from supervised long-tailed learning where tail classes suffer the most. In particular, we uncover that the distributional mismatch not only erodes head-class boundaries, but also pushes head samples into confusable classes, reinforcing the model's inherent bias. To address these issues, we propose a novel model called Margin-Aware Refinement with Structural alignment (MARS). Specifically, we mitigate head-class boundary erosion via Boundary-Preserving Alignment, which takes the zero-shot VLM as a fixed visual reference to suppress probability increases that lack visual support in the training targets. Building upon this, we introduce Margin-aware Self-Refinement, which employs a dynamic adjustment strategy to refine tail and confusable classes while preventing prediction bias. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that MARS outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 4.71 percentage points.