Does CLIP's Generalization Performance Mainly Stem from High Train-Test Similarity?

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Mayilvahanan, Prasanna, Wiedemer, Thaddäus, Rusak, Evgenia, Bethge, Matthias, Brendel, Wieland
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866911798232350720
author Mayilvahanan, Prasanna
Wiedemer, Thaddäus
Rusak, Evgenia
Bethge, Matthias
Brendel, Wieland
author_facet Mayilvahanan, Prasanna
Wiedemer, Thaddäus
Rusak, Evgenia
Bethge, Matthias
Brendel, Wieland
contents Foundation models like CLIP are trained on hundreds of millions of samples and effortlessly generalize to new tasks and inputs. Out of the box, CLIP shows stellar zero-shot and few-shot capabilities on a wide range of out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks, which prior works attribute mainly to today's large and comprehensive training dataset (like LAION). However, it is questionable how meaningful terms like out-of-distribution generalization are for CLIP as it seems likely that web-scale datasets like LAION simply contain many samples that are similar to common OOD benchmarks originally designed for ImageNet. To test this hypothesis, we retrain CLIP on pruned LAION splits that replicate ImageNet's train-test similarity with respect to common OOD benchmarks. While we observe a performance drop on some benchmarks, surprisingly, CLIP's overall performance remains high. This shows that high train-test similarity is insufficient to explain CLIP's OOD performance, and other properties of the training data must drive CLIP to learn more generalizable representations. Additionally, by pruning data points that are dissimilar to the OOD benchmarks, we uncover a 100M split of LAION ($\frac{1}{4}$th of its original size) on which CLIP can be trained to match its original OOD performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_09562
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Does CLIP's Generalization Performance Mainly Stem from High Train-Test Similarity?
Mayilvahanan, Prasanna
Wiedemer, Thaddäus
Rusak, Evgenia
Bethge, Matthias
Brendel, Wieland
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Foundation models like CLIP are trained on hundreds of millions of samples and effortlessly generalize to new tasks and inputs. Out of the box, CLIP shows stellar zero-shot and few-shot capabilities on a wide range of out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks, which prior works attribute mainly to today's large and comprehensive training dataset (like LAION). However, it is questionable how meaningful terms like out-of-distribution generalization are for CLIP as it seems likely that web-scale datasets like LAION simply contain many samples that are similar to common OOD benchmarks originally designed for ImageNet. To test this hypothesis, we retrain CLIP on pruned LAION splits that replicate ImageNet's train-test similarity with respect to common OOD benchmarks. While we observe a performance drop on some benchmarks, surprisingly, CLIP's overall performance remains high. This shows that high train-test similarity is insufficient to explain CLIP's OOD performance, and other properties of the training data must drive CLIP to learn more generalizable representations. Additionally, by pruning data points that are dissimilar to the OOD benchmarks, we uncover a 100M split of LAION ($\frac{1}{4}$th of its original size) on which CLIP can be trained to match its original OOD performance.
title Does CLIP's Generalization Performance Mainly Stem from High Train-Test Similarity?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09562