Feature Projection Learning for Better Vision-Language Reasoning

Abstract: Vision-Language Pre-Trained models, notably CLIP, that utilize contrastive learning have proven highly adept at extracting generalizable visual features. To inherit the well-learned knowledge of VLP models for downstream tasks, several approaches aim to adapt them efficiently with limited supervision. However, these methods either suffer from limited performance, excessive learnable parameters, or extended training times, all of which hinder their effectiveness in adapting the CLIP model to downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a simple yet efficient and effective method called \textit{\textbf{F}eature \textbf{P}rojection \textbf{L}earning(FPL)} to address these problems. Specifically, we develop a projection model that projects class prototype features into the query image feature space and reconstructs the query image feature map. The negative average squared reconstruction error is used as the class score. In this way, we transform the classification problem into a feature projection problem. The final output of this method is a combination of the prediction from the projection model and the original pre-trained CLIP. Comprehensive empirical evaluations confirm that FPL delivers superior accuracy, surpassing the current state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin.