Language Models as Black-Box Optimizers for Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Shihong, Lin, Zhiqiu, Yu, Samuel, Lee, Ryan, Ling, Tiffany, Pathak, Deepak, Ramanan, Deva
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Liu, Shihong
Lin, Zhiqiu
Yu, Samuel
Lee, Ryan
Ling, Tiffany
Pathak, Deepak
Ramanan, Deva
author_facet Liu, Shihong
Lin, Zhiqiu
Yu, Samuel
Lee, Ryan
Ling, Tiffany
Pathak, Deepak
Ramanan, Deva
contents Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on web-scale datasets have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on downstream tasks when fine-tuned with minimal data. However, many VLMs rely on proprietary data and are not open-source, which restricts the use of white-box approaches for fine-tuning. As such, we aim to develop a black-box approach to optimize VLMs through natural language prompts, thereby avoiding the need to access model parameters, feature embeddings, or even output logits. We propose employing chat-based LLMs to search for the best text prompt for VLMs. Specifically, we adopt an automatic hill-climbing procedure that converges to an effective prompt by evaluating the performance of current prompts and asking LLMs to refine them based on textual feedback, all within a conversational process without human-in-the-loop. In a challenging 1-shot image classification setup, our simple approach surpasses the white-box continuous prompting method (CoOp) by an average of 1.5% across 11 datasets including ImageNet. Our approach also outperforms both human-engineered and LLM-generated prompts. We highlight the advantage of conversational feedback that incorporates both positive and negative prompts, suggesting that LLMs can utilize the implicit gradient direction in textual feedback for a more efficient search. In addition, we find that the text prompts generated through our strategy are not only more interpretable but also transfer well across different VLM architectures in a black-box manner. Lastly, we apply our framework to optimize the state-of-the-art black-box VLM (DALL-E 3) for text-to-image generation, prompt inversion, and personalization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_05950
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Language Models as Black-Box Optimizers for Vision-Language Models
Liu, Shihong
Lin, Zhiqiu
Yu, Samuel
Lee, Ryan
Ling, Tiffany
Pathak, Deepak
Ramanan, Deva
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Multimedia
Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on web-scale datasets have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on downstream tasks when fine-tuned with minimal data. However, many VLMs rely on proprietary data and are not open-source, which restricts the use of white-box approaches for fine-tuning. As such, we aim to develop a black-box approach to optimize VLMs through natural language prompts, thereby avoiding the need to access model parameters, feature embeddings, or even output logits. We propose employing chat-based LLMs to search for the best text prompt for VLMs. Specifically, we adopt an automatic hill-climbing procedure that converges to an effective prompt by evaluating the performance of current prompts and asking LLMs to refine them based on textual feedback, all within a conversational process without human-in-the-loop. In a challenging 1-shot image classification setup, our simple approach surpasses the white-box continuous prompting method (CoOp) by an average of 1.5% across 11 datasets including ImageNet. Our approach also outperforms both human-engineered and LLM-generated prompts. We highlight the advantage of conversational feedback that incorporates both positive and negative prompts, suggesting that LLMs can utilize the implicit gradient direction in textual feedback for a more efficient search. In addition, we find that the text prompts generated through our strategy are not only more interpretable but also transfer well across different VLM architectures in a black-box manner. Lastly, we apply our framework to optimize the state-of-the-art black-box VLM (DALL-E 3) for text-to-image generation, prompt inversion, and personalization.
title Language Models as Black-Box Optimizers for Vision-Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05950