Domain Aligned CLIP for Few-shot Classification
Muhammad Waleed Gondal Jochen Gast Inigo Alonso Ruiz Richard Droste Tommaso Macri Suren Kumar Luitpold Staudigl
Large vision-language representation learning models like CLIP have
demonstrated impressive performance for zero-shot transfer to downstream tasks
while largely benefiting from inter-modal (image-text) alignment via
contrastive objectives. This downstream performance can further be enhanced by
full-scale fine-tuning which is often compute intensive, requires large
labelled data, and can reduce out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness.
Furthermore, sole reliance on inter-modal alignment might overlook the rich
information embedded within each individual modality. In this work, we
introduce a sample-efficient domain adaptation strategy for CLIP, termed Domain
Aligned CLIP (DAC), which improves both intra-modal (image-image) and
inter-modal alignment on target distributions without fine-tuning the main
model. For intra-modal alignment, we introduce a lightweight adapter that is
specifically trained with an intra-modal contrastive objective. To improve
inter-modal alignment, we introduce a simple framework to modulate the
precomputed class text embeddings. The proposed few-shot fine-tuning framework
is computationally efficient, robust to distribution shifts, and does not alter
CLIP's parameters. We study the effectiveness of DAC by benchmarking on 11
widely used image classification tasks with consistent improvements in 16-shot
classification upon strong baselines by about 2.3% and demonstrate competitive
performance on 4 OOD robustness benchmarks.