Invariant Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language Model Generalization
Huan Ma Yan Zhu Changqing Zhang Peilin Zhao Baoyuan Wu Long-Kai Huang Qinghua Hu Bingzhe Wu
Vision-language foundation models have exhibited remarkable success across a
multitude of downstream tasks due to their scalability on extensive image-text
paired datasets. However, these models display significant limitations when
applied to long-tail tasks, such as fine-grained image classification, as a
result of "decision shortcuts" that hinders their generalization capabilities.
In this work, we find that the CLIP model possesses a rich set of features,
encompassing both \textit{desired invariant causal features} and
\textit{undesired decision shortcuts}. Moreover, the underperformance of CLIP
on downstream tasks originates from its inability to effectively utilize
pre-trained features in accordance with specific task requirements. To address
this challenge, this paper introduces a test-time prompt tuning paradigm that
optimizes a learnable prompt, thereby compelling the model to exploit genuine
causal invariant features while disregarding decision shortcuts during the
inference phase. The proposed method effectively alleviates excessive
dependence on potentially misleading, task-irrelevant contextual information,
while concurrently emphasizing critical, task-related visual cues. We conduct
comparative analysis of the proposed method against various approaches which
validates its effectiveness.