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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03542 |
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| _version_ | 1866913933125746688 |
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| author | Lin, Ethan Zhao, Linxi Sehgal, Atharva Sun, Jennifer J. |
| author_facet | Lin, Ethan Zhao, Linxi Sehgal, Atharva Sun, Jennifer J. |
| contents | Text-based visual descriptors--ranging from simple class names to more descriptive phrases--are widely used in visual concept discovery and image classification with vision-language models (VLMs). Their effectiveness, however, depends on a complex interplay of factors, including semantic clarity, presence in the VLM's pre-training data, and how well the descriptors serve as a meaningful representation space. In this work, we systematically analyze descriptor quality along two key dimensions: (1) representational capacity, and (2) relationship with VLM pre-training data. We evaluate a spectrum of descriptor generation methods, from zero-shot LLM-generated prompts to iteratively refined descriptors. Motivated by ideas from representation alignment and language understanding, we introduce two alignment-based metrics--Global Alignment and CLIP Similarity--that move beyond accuracy. These metrics shed light on how different descriptor generation strategies interact with foundation model properties, offering new ways to study descriptor effectiveness beyond accuracy evaluations. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_03542 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Beyond Accuracy: Metrics that Uncover What Makes a 'Good' Visual Descriptor Lin, Ethan Zhao, Linxi Sehgal, Atharva Sun, Jennifer J. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Text-based visual descriptors--ranging from simple class names to more descriptive phrases--are widely used in visual concept discovery and image classification with vision-language models (VLMs). Their effectiveness, however, depends on a complex interplay of factors, including semantic clarity, presence in the VLM's pre-training data, and how well the descriptors serve as a meaningful representation space. In this work, we systematically analyze descriptor quality along two key dimensions: (1) representational capacity, and (2) relationship with VLM pre-training data. We evaluate a spectrum of descriptor generation methods, from zero-shot LLM-generated prompts to iteratively refined descriptors. Motivated by ideas from representation alignment and language understanding, we introduce two alignment-based metrics--Global Alignment and CLIP Similarity--that move beyond accuracy. These metrics shed light on how different descriptor generation strategies interact with foundation model properties, offering new ways to study descriptor effectiveness beyond accuracy evaluations. |
| title | Beyond Accuracy: Metrics that Uncover What Makes a 'Good' Visual Descriptor |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03542 |