Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen attribute-object compositions by leveraging knowledge of primitive concepts learned from seen compositions. Although recent works achieve impressive performance in CZSL by leveraging large vision-language models, they primarily rely on discriminative representations that may not explicitly preserve the structured relationships between primitive concepts and their compositions.
MLLMCLIP introduces a heterogeneous distillation framework that transfers multimodal knowledge from a generative Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) teacher directly into a discriminative CLIP student, eliminating the need for synthetic hard negatives. The method uses an attention-based per-layer token selection and a CKA-based distillation loss to bridge architectural differences between the two models. As a result, MLLMCLIP achieves state‑of‑the‑art compositional accuracy and improves zero‑shot classification and image‑text retrieval performance.
By Jongsuk Kim, Qiyu Wu, Zhuoyuan Mao, Hiromi Wakaki, Junmo Kim, Yuki Mitsufuji
Pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP excel at zero-shot recognition but often fail at compositionality, particularly attribute-object and relational structures. Recent studies mitigate this...
ORCA (Orthogonal Residual Compositional Alignment) is a method that improves text-to-image diffusion models by aligning the diffusion transformer’s latent space with a low‑rank target derived from a frozen visual encoder. It introduces an auxiliary loss that uses a predictor with an orthogonal basis parameterised by a learned residual between T5 and CLIP embeddings, providing a prompt‑dependent signal for selecting the visual readout subspace. Experiments on three diffusion‑transformer backbones show that ORCA improves FID and GenEval scores, especially on attribute binding, spatial relations, and multi‑object prompts, without adding inference‑time cost.
By Arshia Hemmat, Amirhossein Vahidi, Amitis Shidani, Mohammad Vali Sanian, Hesam Asadollahzadeh, Aryan Yazdan Parast, Mohammad Lotfollahi
The paper introduces PromptCCZSL, a framework that enables vision‑language models to continually learn new attributes, objects, and their unique compositions while avoiding forgetting. It uses a frozen VLM backbone with prompt‑based techniques, recency‑weighted multi‑teacher distillation, and several loss functions (CAL, OPL, IDL) to maintain prior knowledge and promote diverse, distinct embeddings. Experiments on UT‑Zappos and C‑GQA show significant performance gains over existing VLM‑based and non‑VLM baselines, establishing a new benchmark for continual compositional zero‑shot learning.
By Sauda Maryam, Sara Nadeem, Faisal Qureshi, Mohsen Ali
arXiv:2607. 00374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a textual modification.
By Jingjing Zhang, Lei Zhang, Zheren Fu, Zhendong Mao
The paper introduces CLEAR, a CLoze-style rEAsoning-based Re-ranking framework for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning. CLEAR treats primitive variations as context-driven activations of concrete visual cues rather than independent entities, extracting conditional variants in a coarse-to-fine manner and performing cloze-style reasoning to infer high-level semantics. Experiments show that CLEAR consistently improves base models and surpasses state-of-the-art methods on the C-GQA and MIT-States datasets.
By Weize Li, Zhicheng Zhao, Fei Su
EraseSAE introduces a surgical concept erasure method for text-to-video diffusion models, using sparse autoencoders to decompose activations into interpretable, monosemantic features. The framework employs a contrastive attribution mechanism to isolate concept-specific kernels and applies timestep-resolved masks during inference to remove target concepts while preserving unrelated content. Experiments show that EraseSAE achieves precise, robust concept removal with minimal quality loss, outperforming existing methods.
arXiv:2606. 13288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contrastively trained vision-language models like CLIP, have made remarkable progress in learning joint image-text representations, but still face challenges in compositional understanding.
By Wei Li, Zhen Huang, Xinmei Tian
arXiv:2609.37638v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Current explanation methods for contrastive vision--language models such as CLIP mainly identify important regions without showing how to change the in...
By Van Bach Nguyen, J\"org Schl\"otterer, Christin Seifer
arXiv:2509.22650v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Most existing approaches to referring segmentation achieve strong performance only through fine-tuning or by composing multiple pre-trained models,...
By Anna Kukleva, Enis Simsar, Alessio Tonioni, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Federico Tombari, Jan Eric Lenssen, Bernt Schiele
arXiv:2607. 06856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior work suggests that diffusion representations capture low-level geometry but struggle with high-level semantics.
By Michael King, Aravindh Mahendran, Matthew Koichi Grimes, Fedor Kitashov, Adham Elarabawy, Pedro Velez, Maks Ovsjanikov, Viorica P\u{a}tr\u{a}ucean