The paper introduces G2D, a training‑free framework that combines a discriminative model (CLIP) for broad candidate retrieval with a generative vision‑language model for fine‑grained, image‑grounded verification. By using CLIP’s top‑K shortlist and a structured prior from candidate names and probabilities, G2D focuses generative reasoning on uncertain samples, achieving an average accuracy of 68.85% across eight benchmarks—higher than both CLIP alone (59.35%) and the standalone generative model (63.11%). The approach also adapts to various generator configurations and extends to other models such as DCLIP, WaffleCLIP, and CuPL.
By Zehua Hao, Fang Liu, Qinliang Wang, Yaoyang Du, Xinyan Huang, Puhua Chen
Adapting CLIP for zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) via prompt learning faces a fundamental tension: the model must bridge the sketch-photo domain gap through task-specific adaptation, yet the added flexibility risks overfitting to seen training categories and eroding CLIP's zero-shot generalization. We present SeCo-SBIR, a semantically consistent prompt learning framework that resolves this tension from both sides.
arXiv:2605. 29539v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language foundation models have shown promising zero-shot generalization for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD).
By Jiacong Liu, Shu Luo, Yikai Qin, Yaze Zhao, Yongwei Jiang, Yixiong Zou
arXiv:2606. 07032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image based on a query composed of a reference image and a relative caption without training samples.
By Zhenyu Yang, Zemin Du, Shengsheng Qian, Changsheng Xu
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...
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
arXiv:2606. 26794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: CLIP and its variants are widely adopted visual backbones in multimodal systems, but their pretraining remains dominated by descriptive image-text alignment.
By Sicheng Zhang, Muzammal Naseer, Binzhu Xie, Naufal Suryanto, Shi Qiu, Jamal Bentahar, Naveed Akhtar, Mubarak Shah
arXiv:2606. 15134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched.
By Shubhang Bhatnagar, Dheeraj Baiju, Narendra Ahuja
Recent studies suggest that video generation models can exhibit certain forms of zero-shot visual reasoning through generated frames. Yet reliable evaluation remains challenging: benchmarks should adopt inputs aligned with the visual priors of current video models, require valid evolving processes rather than only plausible final states, and calibrate task difficulty to remain challenging yet partly feasible.
arXiv:2608. 18339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities yet remain sensitive to real-world distribution shifts during inference.
By Qi Yu, Zhichen Zeng, Katherine Tieu, Xiyuan Yang, Ruizhong Qiu, Yuchen Yan, Lihui Liu, Yanjun Zhao, Lingjie Chen, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
arXiv:2606. 07102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose GP-Adapter, a training-free framework that augments CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) with Gaussian Process (GP) uncertainty modeling for few-shot classification and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection.
By Taisei Saito, Koretaka Ogata, Takafumi Hiroi
arXiv:2604. 20329v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent works show that image and video generators exhibit zero-shot visual understanding behaviors, in a way reminiscent of how LLMs develop emergent capabilities of language understanding and reasoning from generative pretraining.
By Valentin Gabeur, Shangbang Long, Songyou Peng, Paul Voigtlaender, Shuyang Sun, Yanan Bao, Karen Truong, Zhicheng Wang, Wenlei Zhou, Jonathan T. Barron, Kyle Genova, Nithish Kannen, Sherry Ben, Yandong Li, Mandy Guo, Suhas Yogin, Yiming Gu, Huizhong Chen, Oliver Wang, Saining Xie, Howard Zhou, Kaiming He, Thomas Funkhouser, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Radu Soricut