Unsupervised Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models

Contrastive vision-language models like CLIP have shown great progress in zero-shot transfer learning. This new paradigm uses large-scale image-text pairs for training and aligns images and texts in a common embedding space. In the inference stage, the proper text description, known as prompt, needs to be carefully designed for zero-shot transfer. To avoid laborious prompt engineering and simultaneously improve transfer performance, recent works such as CoOp, CLIP-Adapter and Tip-Adapter propose to adapt vision-language models for downstream image recognition tasks by either optimizing the continuous prompt representations or training an additional adapter network on top of the pre-trained vision-language models on a small set of labeled data. Though promising improvements are achieved, using labeled images from target datasets may violate the intention of zero-shot transfer of pre-trained vision-language models. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised prompt learning (UPL) framework, which does not require any annotations of the target dataset, to improve the zero-shot transfer of CLIP-like vision-language models. Experimentally, for zero-shot transfer, our UPL outperforms original CLIP with prompt engineering and on ImageNet as well as other 10 datasets. An enhanced version of UPL is even on par with the 8-shot CoOp and the 8-shot TIP-Adapter on most datasets while our method does not need any labeled images for training. Code and models are available at https://github.com/tonyhuang2022/UPL.