Generalizing vision-language models to novel domains: A comprehensive survey

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Main Authors: Li, Xinyao, Li, Jingjing, Li, Fengling, Zhu, Lei, Yang, Yang, Shen, Heng Tao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Xinyao
Li, Jingjing
Li, Fengling
Zhu, Lei
Yang, Yang
Shen, Heng Tao
author_facet Li, Xinyao
Li, Jingjing
Li, Fengling
Zhu, Lei
Yang, Yang
Shen, Heng Tao
contents Recently, vision-language pretraining has emerged as a transformative technique that integrates the strengths of both visual and textual modalities, resulting in powerful vision-language models (VLMs). Leveraging web-scale pretraining data, these models exhibit strong zero-shot capabilities. However, their performance often deteriorates when confronted with domain-specific or specialized generalization tasks. To address this, a growing body of research focuses on transferring or generalizing the rich knowledge embedded in VLMs to various downstream applications. This survey aims to comprehensively summarize the generalization settings, methodologies, benchmarking and results in VLM literatures. Delving into the typical VLM structures, current literatures are categorized into prompt-based, parameter-based and feature-based methods according to the transferred modules. The differences and characteristics in each category are furthered summarized and discussed by revisiting the typical transfer learning (TL) settings, providing novel interpretations for TL in the era of VLMs. Popular benchmarks for VLM generalization are further introduced with thorough performance comparisons among the reviewed methods. Following the advances in large-scale generalizable pretraining, this survey also discusses the relations and differences between VLMs and up-to-date multimodal large language models (MLLM), e.g., DeepSeek-VL. By systematically reviewing the surging literatures in vision-language research from a novel and practical generalization prospective, this survey contributes to a clear landscape of current and future multimodal researches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_18504
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalizing vision-language models to novel domains: A comprehensive survey
Li, Xinyao
Li, Jingjing
Li, Fengling
Zhu, Lei
Yang, Yang
Shen, Heng Tao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Recently, vision-language pretraining has emerged as a transformative technique that integrates the strengths of both visual and textual modalities, resulting in powerful vision-language models (VLMs). Leveraging web-scale pretraining data, these models exhibit strong zero-shot capabilities. However, their performance often deteriorates when confronted with domain-specific or specialized generalization tasks. To address this, a growing body of research focuses on transferring or generalizing the rich knowledge embedded in VLMs to various downstream applications. This survey aims to comprehensively summarize the generalization settings, methodologies, benchmarking and results in VLM literatures. Delving into the typical VLM structures, current literatures are categorized into prompt-based, parameter-based and feature-based methods according to the transferred modules. The differences and characteristics in each category are furthered summarized and discussed by revisiting the typical transfer learning (TL) settings, providing novel interpretations for TL in the era of VLMs. Popular benchmarks for VLM generalization are further introduced with thorough performance comparisons among the reviewed methods. Following the advances in large-scale generalizable pretraining, this survey also discusses the relations and differences between VLMs and up-to-date multimodal large language models (MLLM), e.g., DeepSeek-VL. By systematically reviewing the surging literatures in vision-language research from a novel and practical generalization prospective, this survey contributes to a clear landscape of current and future multimodal researches.
title Generalizing vision-language models to novel domains: A comprehensive survey
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18504