Noise is an Efficient Learner for Zero-Shot Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Imam, Raza, Hanif, Asif, Zhang, Jian, Dawoud, Khaled Waleed, Kementchedjhieva, Yova, Yaqub, Mohammad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Imam, Raza
Hanif, Asif
Zhang, Jian
Dawoud, Khaled Waleed
Kementchedjhieva, Yova
Yaqub, Mohammad
author_facet Imam, Raza
Hanif, Asif
Zhang, Jian
Dawoud, Khaled Waleed
Kementchedjhieva, Yova
Yaqub, Mohammad
contents Recently, test-time adaptation has garnered attention as a method for tuning models without labeled data. The conventional modus operandi for adapting pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) during test-time primarily focuses on tuning learnable prompts; however, this approach overlooks potential distribution shifts in the visual representations themselves. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing Test-Time Noise Tuning (TNT), a novel method for handling unpredictable shifts in the visual space. TNT leverages, for the first time, a noise adaptation strategy that optimizes learnable noise directly in the visual input space, enabling adaptive feature learning from a single test sample. We further introduce a novel approach for inter-view representation alignment by explicitly enforcing coherence in embedding distances, ensuring consistent feature representations across views. Combined with scaled logits and confident view selection at inference, TNT substantially enhances VLM generalization and calibration, achieving average gains of +7.38% on natural distributions benchmark and +0.80% on cross-dataset evaluations over zero-shot CLIP. These improvements lay a strong foundation for adaptive out-of-distribution handling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_06019
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Noise is an Efficient Learner for Zero-Shot Vision-Language Models
Imam, Raza
Hanif, Asif
Zhang, Jian
Dawoud, Khaled Waleed
Kementchedjhieva, Yova
Yaqub, Mohammad
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recently, test-time adaptation has garnered attention as a method for tuning models without labeled data. The conventional modus operandi for adapting pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) during test-time primarily focuses on tuning learnable prompts; however, this approach overlooks potential distribution shifts in the visual representations themselves. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing Test-Time Noise Tuning (TNT), a novel method for handling unpredictable shifts in the visual space. TNT leverages, for the first time, a noise adaptation strategy that optimizes learnable noise directly in the visual input space, enabling adaptive feature learning from a single test sample. We further introduce a novel approach for inter-view representation alignment by explicitly enforcing coherence in embedding distances, ensuring consistent feature representations across views. Combined with scaled logits and confident view selection at inference, TNT substantially enhances VLM generalization and calibration, achieving average gains of +7.38% on natural distributions benchmark and +0.80% on cross-dataset evaluations over zero-shot CLIP. These improvements lay a strong foundation for adaptive out-of-distribution handling.
title Noise is an Efficient Learner for Zero-Shot Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06019