arXiv AI

Simple yet Effective Semi-supervised Knowledge Distillation from Vision-Language Models via Dual-Head Optimization

arXiv AI
Aug 20

From Inference to Adaptation: A Unified Optimal Transport View of Vision Language Model

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 AI
2d ago

PCoreSet: Effective Active Learning through Knowledge Distillation from Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces ActiveKD, a framework that combines active learning with knowledge distillation by using large vision‑language models as teachers. It leverages the structured prediction bias of these models to design Probabilistic CoreSet (PCoreSet), a selection strategy that maximizes coverage in probability space rather than feature space. Experiments on 11 datasets show that ActiveKD improves all selection methods over a no‑distillation baseline, and PCoreSet consistently outperforms random sampling across multiple students and teachers.

By Seongjae Kang, Dong Bok Lee, Hyungjoon Jang, Dongseop Kim, Sung Ju Hwang
arXiv AI
Oct 21

Language Guidance for Supervised Vision Training: An Empirical Study of Generalization

The paper investigates whether pretrained language models can act as lightweight auxiliary supervision for supervised vision training, without requiring paired image-text data or complex objectives. Two forms of language guidance—Explicit Language Guidance (ExLG) and Implicit Language Guidance (ImLG)—are evaluated across six generalization regimes, including in‑distribution, out‑of‑distribution, shortcut resistance, texture/shape bias, adversarial robustness, and continual learning. Results show that ExLG improves in‑distribution, low‑data performance, and continual learning retention, while ImLG is more effective in shortcut‑sensitive and adversarial settings, and both add minimal parameters and training overhead.

By Shruthi Gowda, Nikita Jain, Elahe Arani, Bahram Zonooz
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

MLLMCLIP: Feature-Level Distillation of MLLM for Robust Vision-Language Representations

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 Computer Vision
1d ago

A note on data-efficient finetuning of vision foundation models

The paper evaluates data‑efficient finetuning methods for vision foundation models, focusing on Visual Prompting (VP) and comparing it with Linear Probing, Full Fine‑tuning, and Low Rank Adaptation across different model families (Attention, Convolution, Mamba). It provides an empirical overview of how these models and transfer paradigms interact, broadening previous studies by including more architectures and tuning hyperparameters. The authors also investigate regularization techniques to enhance VP performance, aiming to offer practical guidelines for users.

By Niclas Hergenr\"other, Antonio Orvieto
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

UVU: Improving Multimodal Understanding via Vision-Language Unified Autoregressive Paradigm

UVU is a vision-language unified autoregressive framework that integrates visual supervision directly into the pre-training stage of multimodal large language models. By using continuous visual encoding and a large-scale iterative hierarchical clustering algorithm to build a pixel-level visual codebook, UVU enables lossless representation of visual inputs and autoregressive generation of pixel-level image tokens alongside textual tokens. This approach synergizes pixel-level visual perception with semantic-level visual understanding, allowing models to internalize visual reconstruction capabilities and improve multimodal understanding performance.

By Zhehan Kan, Xinghua Jiang, Yubo Zhu, Yanlin Liu, Xiaochen Yang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 21

Adaptive Dual-Teacher Distillation with Subnetwork Rectification for Bridging Semantic Gaps in Black-Box Domain Adaptation

The paper introduces Adaptive Dual-Teacher Distillation with Subnetwork Rectification (DDSR), a method for black-box domain adaptation that fuses predictions from a black-box source model and a vision‑language model to generate reliable pseudo‑labels for the target domain. DDSR uses adaptive prediction fusion, subnetwork regularization to prevent overfitting, iterative refinement of pseudo‑labels and prompts, and class‑wise prototypes for self‑training. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that DDSR outperforms existing state‑of‑the‑art approaches, even those that have access to source data or source model parameters.

By Zhe Zhang, Jing Li, Wanli Xue, Xu Cheng, Jianhua Zhang, Qinghua Hu, Shengyong Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

Multimodal Large Language Models as Image Classifiers

The paper investigates how evaluation protocols and ground‑truth quality affect the classification performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). It identifies and corrects key issues such as discarded out‑of‑list outputs, inflated distractor choices, and poor open‑world mapping, and shows that design choices like batch size, image ordering, and text encoder selection significantly influence accuracy. Using a multilabel reannotation of 625 ImageNet‑1k classes (ReGT), the study finds that corrected labels can boost MLLM performance by up to 10.8%, narrowing the gap with supervised models, and demonstrates that MLLMs can assist human annotators in about half of difficult cases.

By Nikita Kisel, Illia Volkov, Klara Janouskova, Jiri Matas