CAPT: Confusion-Aware Prompt Tuning for Reducing Vision-Language Misalignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shao, Maoyuan, Gao, Yutong, Huang, Xinyang, Zhu, Chuang, Sun, Lijuan, Nan, Guoshun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Shao, Maoyuan
Gao, Yutong
Huang, Xinyang
Zhu, Chuang
Sun, Lijuan
Nan, Guoshun
author_facet Shao, Maoyuan
Gao, Yutong
Huang, Xinyang
Zhu, Chuang
Sun, Lijuan
Nan, Guoshun
contents Vision-language models like CLIP have achieved remarkable progress in cross-modal representation learning, yet suffer from systematic misclassifications among visually and semantically similar categories. We observe that such confusion patterns are not random but persistently occur between specific category pairs, revealing the model's intrinsic bias and limited fine-grained discriminative ability. To address this, we propose CAPT, a Confusion-Aware Prompt Tuning framework that enables models to learn from their own misalignment. Specifically, we construct a Confusion Bank to explicitly model stable confusion relationships across categories and misclassified samples. On this basis, we introduce a Semantic Confusion Miner (SEM) to capture global inter-class confusion through semantic difference and commonality prompts, and a Sample Confusion Miner (SAM) to retrieve representative misclassified instances from the bank and capture sample-level cues through a Diff-Manner Adapter that integrates global and local contexts. To further unify confusion information across different granularities, a Multi-Granularity Difference Expert (MGDE) module is designed to jointly leverage semantic- and sample-level experts for more robust confusion-aware reasoning. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly reduces confusion-induced errors while enhancing the discriminability and generalization of both base and novel classes, successfully resolving 50.72 percent of confusable sample pairs. Code will be released at https://github.com/greatest-gourmet/CAPT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02557
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CAPT: Confusion-Aware Prompt Tuning for Reducing Vision-Language Misalignment
Shao, Maoyuan
Gao, Yutong
Huang, Xinyang
Zhu, Chuang
Sun, Lijuan
Nan, Guoshun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Vision-language models like CLIP have achieved remarkable progress in cross-modal representation learning, yet suffer from systematic misclassifications among visually and semantically similar categories. We observe that such confusion patterns are not random but persistently occur between specific category pairs, revealing the model's intrinsic bias and limited fine-grained discriminative ability. To address this, we propose CAPT, a Confusion-Aware Prompt Tuning framework that enables models to learn from their own misalignment. Specifically, we construct a Confusion Bank to explicitly model stable confusion relationships across categories and misclassified samples. On this basis, we introduce a Semantic Confusion Miner (SEM) to capture global inter-class confusion through semantic difference and commonality prompts, and a Sample Confusion Miner (SAM) to retrieve representative misclassified instances from the bank and capture sample-level cues through a Diff-Manner Adapter that integrates global and local contexts. To further unify confusion information across different granularities, a Multi-Granularity Difference Expert (MGDE) module is designed to jointly leverage semantic- and sample-level experts for more robust confusion-aware reasoning. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly reduces confusion-induced errors while enhancing the discriminability and generalization of both base and novel classes, successfully resolving 50.72 percent of confusable sample pairs. Code will be released at https://github.com/greatest-gourmet/CAPT.
title CAPT: Confusion-Aware Prompt Tuning for Reducing Vision-Language Misalignment
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02557