We introduce compositional soft prompting (CSP), a parameter-efficient learning technique to improve the zero-shot compositionality of large-scale pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP. We develop CSP for compositional zero-shot learning, the task of predicting unseen attribute-object compositions (e.g., old cat and young tiger). VLMs have a flexible text encoder that can represent arbitrary classes as natural language prompts but they often underperform task-specific architectures on the compositional zero-shot benchmark datasets. CSP treats the attributes and objects that define classes as learnable tokens of vocabulary. During training, the vocabulary is tuned to recognize classes that compose tokens in multiple ways (e.g., old cat and white cat). At test time, we recompose the learned attribute-object vocabulary in new combinations to recognize novel classes. We show that CSP outperforms the CLIP on benchmark datasets by an average of 10.9 percentage points on AUC. CSP also outperforms CoOp, a soft prompting method that fine-tunes the prefix context tokens, by an average of 5.8 percentage points on AUC. We perform additional experiments to show that CSP improves generalization to higher-order attribute-attribute-object compositions (e.g., old white cat) and combinations of pretrained attributes and fine-tuned objects. The code is available at https://github.com/BatsResearch/csp.
Despite the success of deep neural networks, there are still many challenges in deep representation learning due to the data scarcity issues such as data imbalance, unseen distribution, and domain shift. To address the above-mentioned issues, a variety of methods have been devised to explore the sample relationships in a vanilla way (i.e., from the perspectives of either the input or the loss function), failing to explore the internal structure of deep neural networks for learning with sample relationships. Inspired by this, we propose to enable deep neural networks themselves with the ability to learn the sample relationships from each mini-batch. Specifically, we introduce a batch transformer module or BatchFormer, which is then applied into the batch dimension of each mini-batch to implicitly explore sample relationships during training. By doing this, the proposed method enables the collaboration of different samples, e.g., the head-class samples can also contribute to the learning of the tail classes for long-tailed recognition. Furthermore, to mitigate the gap between training and testing, we share the classifier between with or without the BatchFormer during training, which can thus be removed during testing. We perform extensive experiments on over ten datasets and the proposed method achieves significant improvements on different data scarcity applications without any bells and whistles, including the tasks of long-tailed recognition, compositional zero-shot learning, domain generalization, and contrastive learning. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/zhihou7/BatchFormer.
Attributes and objects can compose diverse compositions. To model the compositional nature of these concepts, it is a good choice to learn them as transformations, e.g., coupling and decoupling. However, complex transformations need to satisfy specific principles to guarantee rationality. Here, we first propose a previously ignored principle of attribute-object transformation: Symmetry. For example, coupling peeled-apple with attribute peeled should result in peeled-apple, and decoupling peeled from apple should still output apple. Incorporating the symmetry, we propose a transformation framework inspired by group theory, i.e., SymNet. It consists of two modules: Coupling Network and Decoupling Network. We adopt deep neural networks to implement SymNet and train it in an end-to-end paradigm with the group axioms and symmetry as objectives. Then, we propose a Relative Moving Distance (RMD) based method to utilize the attribute change instead of the attribute pattern itself to classify attributes. Besides the compositions of single-attribute and object, our RMD is also suitable for complex compositions of multiple attributes and objects when incorporating attribute correlations. SymNet can be utilized for attribute learning, compositional zero-shot learning and outperforms the state-of-the-art on four widely-used benchmarks. Code is at https://github.com/DirtyHarryLYL/SymNet.
This paper proposes a novel model for recognizing images with composite attribute-object concepts, notably for composite concepts that are unseen during model training. We aim to explore the three key properties required by the task --- relation-aware, consistent, and decoupled --- to learn rich and robust features for primitive concepts that compose attribute-object pairs. To this end, we propose the Blocked Message Passing Network (BMP-Net). The model consists of two modules. The concept module generates semantically meaningful features for primitive concepts, whereas the visual module extracts visual features for attributes and objects from input images. A message passing mechanism is used in the concept module to capture the relations between primitive concepts. Furthermore, to prevent the model from being biased towards seen composite concepts and reduce the entanglement between attributes and objects, we propose a blocking mechanism that equalizes the information available to the model for both seen and unseen concepts. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on two benchmarks show the efficacy of the proposed model.
Humans are good at compositional zero-shot reasoning; someone who has never seen a zebra before could nevertheless recognize one when we tell them it looks like a horse with black and white stripes. Machine learning systems, on the other hand, usually leverage spurious correlations in the training data, and while such correlations can help recognize objects in context, they hurt generalization. To be able to deal with underspecified datasets while still leveraging contextual clues during classification, we propose ProtoProp, a novel prototype propagation graph method. First we learn prototypical representations of objects (e.g., zebra) that are conditionally independent w.r.t. their attribute labels (e.g., stripes) and vice versa. Next we propagate the independent prototypes through a compositional graph, to learn compositional prototypes of novel attribute-object combinations that reflect the dependencies of the target distribution. The method does not rely on any external data, such as class hierarchy graphs or pretrained word embeddings. We evaluate our approach on AO-Clever, a synthetic and strongly visual dataset with clean labels, and UT-Zappos, a noisy real-world dataset of fine-grained shoe types. We show that in the generalized compositional zero-shot setting we outperform state-of-the-art results, and through ablations we show the importance of each part of the method and their contribution to the final results.
Compositional Zero-Shot learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen compositions of state and object visual primitives seen during training. A problem with standard CZSL is the assumption of knowing which unseen compositions will be available at test time. In this work, we overcome this assumption operating on the open world setting, where no limit is imposed on the compositional space at test time, and the search space contains a large number of unseen compositions. To address this problem, we propose a new approach, Compositional Cosine Graph Embeddings (Co-CGE), based on two principles. First, Co-CGE models the dependency between states, objects and their compositions through a graph convolutional neural network. The graph propagates information from seen to unseen concepts, improving their representations. Second, since not all unseen compositions are equally feasible, and less feasible ones may damage the learned representations, Co-CGE estimates a feasibility score for each unseen composition, using the scores as margins in a cosine similarity-based loss and as weights in the adjacency matrix of the graphs. Experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances in standard CZSL while outperforming previous methods in the open world scenario.
In compositional zero-shot learning, the goal is to recognize unseen compositions (e.g. old dog) of observed visual primitives states (e.g. old, cute) and objects (e.g. car, dog) in the training set. This is challenging because the same state can for example alter the visual appearance of a dog drastically differently from a car. As a solution, we propose a novel graph formulation called Compositional Graph Embedding (CGE) that learns image features, compositional classifiers, and latent representations of visual primitives in an end-to-end manner. The key to our approach is exploiting the dependency between states, objects, and their compositions within a graph structure to enforce the relevant knowledge transfer from seen to unseen compositions. By learning a joint compatibility that encodes semantics between concepts, our model allows for generalization to unseen compositions without relying on an external knowledge base like WordNet. We show that in the challenging generalized compositional zero-shot setting our CGE significantly outperforms the state of the art on MIT-States and UT-Zappos. We also propose a new benchmark for this task based on the recent GQA dataset. Code is available at: https://github.com/ExplainableML/czsl
Compositional Zero-Shot learning (CZSL) requires to recognize state-object compositions unseen during training. In this work, instead of assuming prior knowledge about the unseen compositions, we operate in the open world setting, where the search space includes a large number of unseen compositions some of which might be unfeasible. In this setting, we start from the cosine similarity between visual features and compositional embeddings. After estimating the feasibility score of each composition, we use these scores to either directly mask the output space or as a margin for the cosine similarity between visual features and compositional embeddings during training. Our experiments on two standard CZSL benchmarks show that all the methods suffer severe performance degradation when applied in the open world setting. While our simple CZSL model achieves state-of-the-art performances in the closed world scenario, our feasibility scores boost the performance of our approach in the open world setting, clearly outperforming the previous state of the art.
People easily recognize new visual categories that are new combinations of known components. This compositional generalization capacity is critical for learning in real-world domains like vision and language because the long tail of new combinations dominates the distribution. Unfortunately, learning systems struggle with compositional generalization because they often build on features that are correlated with class labels even if they are not "essential" for the class. This leads to consistent misclassification of samples from a new distribution, like new combinations of known components. Here we describe an approach for compositional generalization that builds on causal ideas. First, we describe compositional zero-shot learning from a causal perspective, and propose to view zero-shot inference as finding "which intervention caused the image?". Second, we present a causal-inspired embedding model that learns disentangled representations of elementary components of visual objects from correlated (confounded) training data. We evaluate this approach on two datasets for predicting new combinations of attribute-object pairs: A well-controlled synthesized images dataset and a real-world dataset which consists of fine-grained types of shoes. We show improvements compared to strong baselines.
Attributes and objects can compose diverse compositions. To model the compositional nature of these general concepts, it is a good choice to learn them through transformations, such as coupling and decoupling. However, complex transformations need to satisfy specific principles to guarantee the rationality. In this paper, we first propose a previously ignored principle of attribute-object transformation: Symmetry. For example, coupling peeled-apple with attribute peeled should result in peeled-apple, and decoupling peeled from apple should still output apple. Incorporating the symmetry principle, a transformation framework inspired by group theory is built, i.e. SymNet. SymNet consists of two modules, Coupling Network and Decoupling Network. With the group axioms and symmetry property as objectives, we adopt Deep Neural Networks to implement SymNet and train it in an end-to-end paradigm. Moreover, we propose a Relative Moving Distance (RMD) based recognition method to utilize the attribute change instead of the attribute pattern itself to classify attributes. Our symmetry learning can be utilized for the Compositional Zero-Shot Learning task and outperforms the state-of-the-art on widely-used benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/DirtyHarryLYL/SymNet.
We present a new approach to modeling visual attributes. Prior work casts attributes in a similar role as objects, learning a latent representation where properties (e.g., sliced) are recognized by classifiers much in the way objects (e.g., apple) are. However, this common approach fails to separate the attributes observed during training from the objects with which they are composed, making it ineffectual when encountering new attribute-object compositions. Instead, we propose to model attributes as operators. Our approach learns a semantic embedding that explicitly factors out attributes from their accompanying objects, and also benefits from novel regularizers expressing attribute operators' effects (e.g., blunt should undo the effects of sharp). Not only does our approach align conceptually with the linguistic role of attributes as modifiers, but it also generalizes to recognize unseen compositions of objects and attributes. We validate our approach on two challenging datasets and demonstrate significant improvements over the state-of-the-art. In addition, we show that not only can our model recognize unseen compositions robustly in an open-world setting, it can also generalize to compositions where objects themselves were unseen during training.