arXiv Computer Vision

What Does Prompt Learning Change? -A Natural-Language Concept Analysis of Vision-Language Models

Prompt learning modifies vision‑language models by optimizing continuous prompt vectors, yet the resulting prompts are hard to interpret in natural language. PromptSpLiCE is a post‑hoc method that rewrites each class‑conditioned text embedding as a sparse mix of concepts from a fixed dictionary, enabling a direct comparison of concept profiles before and after prompt learning. Across 11 image‑classification datasets, the method shows that only about 1.6 of the initial top‑10 concepts remain after learning, and that larger profile changes correlate with higher accuracy gains, while a derived gradient expression offers geometric insight into loss sensitivity.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

ProCAP: Probabilistic Cross-Attentive Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models

ProCAP introduces a probabilistic cross-attentive prompt learning framework for vision-language models like CLIP, enabling improved cross-modal interaction without updating the backbone. It jointly learns visual and textual prompt tokens, linking them via stacked bidirectional multi-head cross-attention to refine each branch across prompt depth. The method incorporates Gaussian parameterization of prompt tokens, lightweight KL and L2 regularization, and a compact symmetric InfoNCE head to align image features with class-level text representations, achieving strong few-shot base-to-novel performance and competitive transfer results across multiple datasets and benchmarks.

By Hiwa Azeez Abbas, Fatemeh Daneshfar, Moloud Abdar
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Guided Prompt Evolution for Vision-Language Models Adaptation

The paper introduces EvoPrompt, a framework for adapting vision‑language models to new tasks with limited data while preventing catastrophic forgetting. EvoPrompt uses a Modality‑Shared Prompt Projector to create hierarchical prompts and an evolutionary training strategy that separates low‑rank updates into directional and magnitude components, preserving learned semantic directions. Experiments show that EvoPrompt achieves state‑of‑the‑art few‑shot performance while maintaining the original zero‑shot capabilities of the pre‑trained models.

By Enming Zhang, Jiayang Li, Yanlong Wang, Yanru Wu, Zhenyu Liu, Yang Li
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

Diffusion Meta-Prompting and Steering for Generalizable Foundation Model Adaptation

The paper introduces Diffusion Meta-Prompt (DMP), a framework that learns a distribution of prompts via diffusion models, enabling the synthesis of new prompts from natural language task descriptions without needing original task data or losses. DMP incorporates a test-time steering strategy that uses a best training prompt as a latent anchor to stabilize sampling, improving generalization across classification, retrieval, and text-to-image generation tasks. The method reduces storage and inference costs by over 90% compared to prompt retrieval, achieves up to 2.0% average gains over prior meta-learning methods on composite classification, and provides a theoretical bound on expected task loss.

By Deepak Sridhar, Yi Li, Kartikeya Bhardwaj, Shuangjun Liu, Taotao Jing, Yuan Li, Shuai Zhang, Jiancheng Lyu, Dashan Gao, Nuno Vasconcelos
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

TecoPrompt: Temporal-Conservative Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models

TecoPrompt introduces a closed‑loop robust prompt‑learning framework that mitigates label noise in vision‑language models. It uses optimal transport in the CLIP semantic space to generate globally consistent pseudo‑labels, then verifies their reliability by checking trajectory stability over a K‑epoch window and an EMA‑based confidence gate. The verified labels are incorporated into prompt training via a tri‑group objective, yielding significant accuracy gains across multiple noisy datasets, such as a 0.843 accuracy on OxfordPets with 50% asymmetric noise.

By Zeyi Shao, Haowen Hua, Jiaxin Zhang, John See, Zeyd Boukhers, Cong Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

CARPRT: Class-Aware Zero-Shot Prompt Reweighting for Black-Box Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2607. 14125v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) enable zero-shot image classification by computing the similarity score between an image and textual descriptions, typically formed by inserting a class label (e.

By Ruijiang Dong, Zesheng Ye, Jianzhong Qi, Lei Feng, Feng Liu, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama
arXiv AI
Aug 24

CFM: Language-aligned Concept Foundation Model for Vision

The paper introduces CFM, a language‑aligned concept foundation model for vision that generates fine‑grained, human‑interpretable concepts with spatial grounding. By pairing CFM with a strong semantic foundation model, it provides explanations for downstream tasks such as classification, segmentation, and captioning. The authors also analyze local co‑occurrence of concepts to define relationships, improving concept naming and yielding richer explanations while maintaining competitive performance.

By Kai Wittenmayer, Sukrut Rao, Amin Parchami-Araghi, Bernt Schiele, Jonas Fischer