Dynamic Multimodal Prototype Learning in Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhu, Xingyu, Wang, Shuo, Zhu, Beier, Li, Miaoge, Li, Yunfan, Fang, Junfeng, Wang, Zhicai, Wang, Dongsheng, Zhang, Hanwang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhu, Xingyu
Wang, Shuo
Zhu, Beier
Li, Miaoge
Li, Yunfan
Fang, Junfeng
Wang, Zhicai
Wang, Dongsheng
Zhang, Hanwang
author_facet Zhu, Xingyu
Wang, Shuo
Zhu, Beier
Li, Miaoge
Li, Yunfan
Fang, Junfeng
Wang, Zhicai
Wang, Dongsheng
Zhang, Hanwang
contents With the increasing attention to pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), \eg, CLIP, substantial efforts have been devoted to many downstream tasks, especially in test-time adaptation (TTA). However, previous works focus on learning prototypes only in the textual modality while overlooking the ambiguous semantics in class names. These ambiguities lead to textual prototypes that are insufficient to capture visual concepts, resulting in limited performance. To address this issue, we introduce \textbf{ProtoMM}, a training-free framework that constructs multimodal prototypes to adapt VLMs during the test time. By viewing the prototype as a discrete distribution over the textual descriptions and visual particles, ProtoMM has the ability to combine the multimodal features for comprehensive prototype learning. More importantly, the visual particles are dynamically updated as the testing stream flows. This allows our multimodal prototypes to continually learn from the data, enhancing their generalizability in unseen scenarios. In addition, we quantify the importance of the prototypes and test images by formulating their semantic distance as an optimal transport problem. Extensive experiments on 15 zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 1.03\% average accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art methods on ImageNet and its variant datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_03657
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dynamic Multimodal Prototype Learning in Vision-Language Models
Zhu, Xingyu
Wang, Shuo
Zhu, Beier
Li, Miaoge
Li, Yunfan
Fang, Junfeng
Wang, Zhicai
Wang, Dongsheng
Zhang, Hanwang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
With the increasing attention to pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), \eg, CLIP, substantial efforts have been devoted to many downstream tasks, especially in test-time adaptation (TTA). However, previous works focus on learning prototypes only in the textual modality while overlooking the ambiguous semantics in class names. These ambiguities lead to textual prototypes that are insufficient to capture visual concepts, resulting in limited performance. To address this issue, we introduce \textbf{ProtoMM}, a training-free framework that constructs multimodal prototypes to adapt VLMs during the test time. By viewing the prototype as a discrete distribution over the textual descriptions and visual particles, ProtoMM has the ability to combine the multimodal features for comprehensive prototype learning. More importantly, the visual particles are dynamically updated as the testing stream flows. This allows our multimodal prototypes to continually learn from the data, enhancing their generalizability in unseen scenarios. In addition, we quantify the importance of the prototypes and test images by formulating their semantic distance as an optimal transport problem. Extensive experiments on 15 zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 1.03\% average accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art methods on ImageNet and its variant datasets.
title Dynamic Multimodal Prototype Learning in Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03657