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Diversity is Definitely Needed: Improving Model-Agnostic Zero-shot Classification via Stable Diffusion

Jordan Shipard, Arnold Wiliem, Kien Nguyen, Wei Xiang, Clinton Fookes

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the problem of Model-Agnostic Zero-Shot Classification (MA-ZSC), which refers to training non-specific classification architectures (downstream models) to classify real images without using any real images during training. Recent research has demonstrated that generating synthetic training images using diffusion models provides a potential solution to address MA-ZSC. However, the performance of this approach currently falls short of that achieved by large-scale vision-language models. One possible explanation is a potential significant domain gap between synthetic and real images. Our work offers a fresh perspective on the problem by providing initial insights that MA-ZSC performance can be improved by improving the diversity of images in the generated dataset. We propose a set of modifications to the text-to-image generation process using a pre-trained diffusion model to enhance diversity, which we refer to as our bag of tricks. Our approach shows notable improvements in various classification architectures, with results comparable to state-of-the-art models such as CLIP. To validate our approach, we conduct experiments on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and EuroSAT, which is particularly difficult for zero-shot classification due to its satellite image domain. We evaluate our approach with five classification architectures, including ResNet and ViT. Our findings provide initial insights into the problem of MA-ZSC using diffusion models.

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