Zoom-shot: Fast and Efficient Unsupervised Zero-Shot Transfer of CLIP to Vision Encoders with Multimodal Loss

The fusion of vision and language has brought about a transformative shift in computer vision through the emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, the resource-intensive nature of existing VLMs poses a significant challenge. We need an accessible method for developing the next generation of VLMs. To address this issue, we propose Zoom-shot, a novel method for transferring the zero-shot capabilities of CLIP to any pre-trained vision encoder. We do this by exploiting the multimodal information (i.e. text and image) present in the CLIP latent space through the use of specifically designed multimodal loss functions. These loss functions are (1) cycle-consistency loss and (2) our novel prompt-guided knowledge distillation loss (PG-KD). PG-KD combines the concept of knowledge distillation with CLIP's zero-shot classification, to capture the interactions between text and image features. With our multimodal losses, we train a $\textbf{linear mapping}$ between the CLIP latent space and the latent space of a pre-trained vision encoder, for only a $\textbf{single epoch}$. Furthermore, Zoom-shot is entirely unsupervised and is trained using $\textbf{unpaired}$ data. We test the zero-shot capabilities of a range of vision encoders augmented as new VLMs, on coarse and fine-grained classification datasets, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art in this problem domain. In our ablations, we find Zoom-shot allows for a trade-off between data and compute during training; and our state-of-the-art results can be obtained by reducing training from 20% to 1% of the ImageNet training data with 20 epochs. All code and models are available on GitHub.