Modeling Variants of Prompts for Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Ao, Liu, Zongfang, Li, Xinhua, Zhang, Jinghui, Wang, Pengwei, Wang, Hu
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Li, Ao
Liu, Zongfang
Li, Xinhua
Zhang, Jinghui
Wang, Pengwei
Wang, Hu
author_facet Li, Ao
Liu, Zongfang
Li, Xinhua
Zhang, Jinghui
Wang, Pengwei
Wang, Hu
contents Large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to leveraging human language for enhancing downstream tasks. However, VLMs such as CLIP face significant limitation: its performance is highly sensitive to prompt template design. Although prompt learning methods can address the sensitivity issue by replacing natural language prompts with learnable ones, they are incomprehensible to humans. Ensuring consistent performance across various prompt templates enables models to adapt seamlessly to diverse phrasings, enhancing their ability to handle downstream tasks without requiring extensive prompt engineering. In this work, we introduce the RobustPrompt Benchmark, a systematic benchmark to evaluate robustness to different prompt templates for VLMs. It includes a dataset with hundreds of carefully designed prompt templates, divided into six types, covering a wide variety of commonly used templates. Beside the benchmark, we propose Modeling Variants of Prompts (MVP), a simple yet effective method that mitigates sensitivity by modeling variants of prompt structures. The innovation of MVP lies in decoupling prompts into templates and class names, and using Variational Autoencoders (VAE) to model the distribution of diverse prompt structures. Experiments across 11 datasets demonstrate that MVP can greatly enhance model robustness to variations in input prompts without a drop in performance. The code is available at https://github.com/liaolea/MVP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_08229
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modeling Variants of Prompts for Vision-Language Models
Li, Ao
Liu, Zongfang
Li, Xinhua
Zhang, Jinghui
Wang, Pengwei
Wang, Hu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to leveraging human language for enhancing downstream tasks. However, VLMs such as CLIP face significant limitation: its performance is highly sensitive to prompt template design. Although prompt learning methods can address the sensitivity issue by replacing natural language prompts with learnable ones, they are incomprehensible to humans. Ensuring consistent performance across various prompt templates enables models to adapt seamlessly to diverse phrasings, enhancing their ability to handle downstream tasks without requiring extensive prompt engineering. In this work, we introduce the RobustPrompt Benchmark, a systematic benchmark to evaluate robustness to different prompt templates for VLMs. It includes a dataset with hundreds of carefully designed prompt templates, divided into six types, covering a wide variety of commonly used templates. Beside the benchmark, we propose Modeling Variants of Prompts (MVP), a simple yet effective method that mitigates sensitivity by modeling variants of prompt structures. The innovation of MVP lies in decoupling prompts into templates and class names, and using Variational Autoencoders (VAE) to model the distribution of diverse prompt structures. Experiments across 11 datasets demonstrate that MVP can greatly enhance model robustness to variations in input prompts without a drop in performance. The code is available at https://github.com/liaolea/MVP.
title Modeling Variants of Prompts for Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08229