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Beyond Sole Strength: Customized Ensembles for Generalized Vision-Language Models, ICML2024

Zhihe Lu, Jiawang Bai, Xin Li, Zeyu Xiao, Xinchao Wang

<p align="justify"> Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), e.g., CLIP, for the open-world generalization has gained increasing popularity due to its practical value. However, performance advancements are limited when relying solely on intricate algorithmic designs for a single model, even one exhibiting strong performance, e.g., CLIP-ViTB/16. This paper, for the first time, explores the collaborative potential of leveraging much weaker VLMs to enhance the generalization of a robust single model. The affirmative findings motivate us to address the generalization problem from a novel perspective, i.e., ensemble of pretrained VLMs. We introduce three customized ensemble strategies, each tailored to one specific scenario. Firstly, we introduce the zero-shot ensemble, automatically adjusting the logits of different models based on their confidence when only pre-trained VLMs are available. Furthermore, for scenarios with extra few-shot samples, we propose the training-free and tuning ensemble, offering flexibility based on the availability of computing resources. The proposed ensemble strategies are evaluated on zero-shot, base-tonew, and cross-dataset generalization, achieving new stateof-the-art performance. Notably, this work represents an initial stride toward enhancing the generalization performance of VLMs via ensemble. The code is available publicly. </p>

Highlights

<p align="justify"> Description of above figure: Comparing existing methods on base-to-new generalization across 11 recognition datasets averaged over 3 seeds. The results indicate that the proposed method outperforms existing arts on 11 diverse datasets, often by large margins. </p>

Installation

For installation and other package requirements, please follow the instructions detailed in INSTALL.md.

Data Preparation

Please follow the instructions at DATASETS.md to prepare all datasets.

Training and Evaluation

Please refer to the TRAIN.md for detailed instructions on training/running our three ensemble strategies.

Citation

If you find our work or this repository useful, please consider giving a star :star: and citation.

@article{lu2023beyond,
  title={Beyond Sole Strength: Customized Ensembles for Generalized Vision-Language Models},
  author={Lu, Zhihe and Bai, Jiawang and Li, Xin and Xiao, Zeyu and Wang, Xinchao},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.17091},
  year={2023}
}

Contact

If you have any questions, please create an issue on this repository or contact at zhihelu.academic[at]gmail.com.

Acknowledgements

Our code is based on PromptSRC, MaPLe and CoCoOp and CoOp repositories. We thank the authors for releasing their code. If you use our code, please consider citing these works as well.