What Do You See? Enhancing Zero-Shot Image Classification with Multimodal Large Language Models

Abdelrahman Abdelhamed, Mahmoud Afifi, Alec Go

Keywords: large language models, zero shot image classification, cross modal representation

TL;DR: Using large language models for improving zero shot image classification.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been effectively used for many computer vision tasks, including image classification. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach for zero-shot image classification using multimodal LLMs. By employing multimodal LLMs, we generate comprehensive textual representations from input images. These textual representations are then utilized to generate fixed-dimensional features in a cross-modal embedding space. Subsequently, these features are fused together to perform zero-shot classification using a linear classifier. Our method does not require prompt engineering for each dataset; instead, we use a single, straightforward, set of prompts across all datasets. We evaluated our method on several datasets, and our results demonstrate its remarkable effectiveness, surpassing benchmark accuracy on multiple datasets. On average, our method achieved an accuracy gain of 4.1 percentage points, with an increase of 6.8 percentage points on the ImageNet dataset, compared to prior methods. Our findings highlight the potential of multimodal LLMs to enhance computer vision tasks such as zero-shot image classification, offering a significant improvement over traditional methods.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

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Submission Number: 10350