Jonas Herzog

Jonas Herzog, Yue Wang

Recent research suggested that the embeddings produced by CLIP-like contrastive language-image training are suboptimal for image-only tasks. The main theory is that the inter-modal (language-image) alignment loss ignores intra-modal (image-image) alignment, leading to poorly calibrated distances between images. In this study, we question this intra-modal misalignment hypothesis. We reexamine its foundational theoretical argument, the indicators used to support it, and the performance metrics affected. For the theoretical argument, we demonstrate that there are no such supposed degrees of freedom for image embedding distances. For the empirical measures, our findings reveal they yield similar results for language-image trained models (CLIP, SigLIP) and image-image trained models (DINO, SigLIP2). This indicates the observed phenomena do not stem from a misalignment specific to the former. Experiments on the commonly studied intra-modal tasks retrieval and few-shot classification confirm that addressing task ambiguity, not supposed misalignment, is key for best results.

Jonas Herzog

Few-shot segmentation performance declines substantially when facing images from a domain different than the training domain, effectively limiting real-world use cases. To alleviate this, recently cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) has emerged. Works that address this task mainly attempted to learn segmentation on a source domain in a manner that generalizes across domains. Surprisingly, we can outperform these approaches while eliminating the training stage and removing their main segmentation network. We show test-time task-adaption is the key for successful CD-FSS instead. Task-adaption is achieved by appending small networks to the feature pyramid of a conventionally classification-pretrained backbone. To avoid overfitting to the few labeled samples in supervised fine-tuning, consistency across augmented views of input images serves as guidance while learning the parameters of the attached layers. Despite our self-restriction not to use any images other than the few labeled samples at test time, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance in CD-FSS, evidencing the need to rethink approaches for the task.