What Makes CLIP More Robust to Long-Tailed Pre-Training Data? A Controlled Study for Transferable Insights

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wen, Xin, Zhao, Bingchen, Chen, Yilun, Pang, Jiangmiao, Qi, Xiaojuan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Wen, Xin
Zhao, Bingchen
Chen, Yilun
Pang, Jiangmiao
Qi, Xiaojuan
author_facet Wen, Xin
Zhao, Bingchen
Chen, Yilun
Pang, Jiangmiao
Qi, Xiaojuan
contents Severe data imbalance naturally exists among web-scale vision-language datasets. Despite this, we find CLIP pre-trained thereupon exhibits notable robustness to the data imbalance compared to supervised learning, and demonstrates significant effectiveness in learning generalizable representations. With an aim to investigate the reasons behind this finding, we conduct controlled experiments to study various underlying factors, and reveal that CLIP's pretext task forms a dynamic classification problem wherein only a subset of classes is present in training. This isolates the bias from dominant classes and implicitly balances the learning signal. Furthermore, the robustness and discriminability of CLIP improve with more descriptive language supervision, larger data scale, and broader open-world concepts, which are inaccessible to supervised learning. Our study not only uncovers the mechanisms behind CLIP's generalizability beyond data imbalance but also provides transferable insights for the research community. The findings are validated in both supervised and self-supervised learning, enabling models trained on imbalanced data to achieve CLIP-level performance on diverse recognition tasks. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/clip-beyond-tail.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_21070
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Makes CLIP More Robust to Long-Tailed Pre-Training Data? A Controlled Study for Transferable Insights
Wen, Xin
Zhao, Bingchen
Chen, Yilun
Pang, Jiangmiao
Qi, Xiaojuan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Severe data imbalance naturally exists among web-scale vision-language datasets. Despite this, we find CLIP pre-trained thereupon exhibits notable robustness to the data imbalance compared to supervised learning, and demonstrates significant effectiveness in learning generalizable representations. With an aim to investigate the reasons behind this finding, we conduct controlled experiments to study various underlying factors, and reveal that CLIP's pretext task forms a dynamic classification problem wherein only a subset of classes is present in training. This isolates the bias from dominant classes and implicitly balances the learning signal. Furthermore, the robustness and discriminability of CLIP improve with more descriptive language supervision, larger data scale, and broader open-world concepts, which are inaccessible to supervised learning. Our study not only uncovers the mechanisms behind CLIP's generalizability beyond data imbalance but also provides transferable insights for the research community. The findings are validated in both supervised and self-supervised learning, enabling models trained on imbalanced data to achieve CLIP-level performance on diverse recognition tasks. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/clip-beyond-tail.
title What Makes CLIP More Robust to Long-Tailed Pre-Training Data? A Controlled Study for Transferable Insights
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.21070