Investigating the Limitation of CLIP Models: The Worst-Performing
  Categories
Jie-Jing Shao Jiang-Xin Shi Xiao-Wen Yang Lan-Zhe Guo Yu-Feng Li
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) provides a foundation model by
integrating natural language into visual concepts, enabling zero-shot
recognition on downstream tasks. It is usually expected that satisfactory
overall accuracy can be achieved across numerous domains through well-designed
textual prompts. However, we found that their performance in the worst
categories is significantly inferior to the overall performance. For example,
on ImageNet, there are a total of 10 categories with class-wise accuracy as low
as 0\%, even though the overall performance has achieved 64.1\%. This
phenomenon reveals the potential risks associated with using CLIP models,
particularly in risk-sensitive applications where specific categories hold
significant importance. To address this issue, we investigate the alignment
between the two modalities in the CLIP model and propose the Class-wise
Matching Margin (\cmm) to measure the inference confusion. \cmm\ can
effectively identify the worst-performing categories and estimate the potential
performance of the candidate prompts. We further query large language models to
enrich descriptions of worst-performing categories and build a weighted
ensemble to highlight the efficient prompts. Experimental results clearly
verify the effectiveness of our proposal, where the accuracy on the worst-10
categories on ImageNet is boosted to 5.2\%, without manual prompt engineering,
laborious optimization, or access to labeled validation data.