Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models

Large pre-trained models such as CLIP offer consistent accuracy across a range of data distributions when performing zero-shot inference (i.e., without fine-tuning on a specific dataset). Although existing fine-tuning approaches substantially improve accuracy in-distribution, they also reduce out-of-distribution robustness. We address this tension by introducing a simple and effective method for improving robustness: ensembling the weights of the zero-shot and fine-tuned models. Compared to standard fine-tuning, the resulting weight-space ensembles provide large accuracy improvements out-of-distribution, while matching or improving in-distribution accuracy. On ImageNet and five derived distribution shifts, weight-space ensembles improve out-of-distribution accuracy by 2 to 10 percentage points while increasing in-distribution accuracy by nearly 1 percentage point relative to standard fine-tuning. These improvements come at no additional computational cost during fine-tuning or inference.