Fine-tuning CLIP Text Encoders with Two-step Paraphrasing
This addresses the problem of handling diverse user queries in vision-language applications, but it is an incremental improvement over existing CLIP models.
The paper tackles CLIP models' limitations in handling linguistic variations like paraphrases by fine-tuning the text encoder with automatically generated paraphrases, resulting in ParaCLIP which improves rank similarity scores by up to 2.0% and 5.6% on paraphrased retrieval tasks.
Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models have demonstrated considerable success across various vision-language tasks, such as text-to-image retrieval, where the model is required to effectively process natural language input to produce an accurate visual output. However, current models still face limitations in dealing with linguistic variations in input queries, such as paraphrases, making it challenging to handle a broad range of user queries in real-world applications. In this study, we introduce a straightforward fine-tuning approach to enhance the representations of CLIP models for paraphrases. Our approach involves a two-step paraphrase generation process, where we automatically create two categories of paraphrases from web-scale image captions by leveraging large language models. Subsequently, we fine-tune the CLIP text encoder using these generated paraphrases while freezing the image encoder. Our resulting model, which we call ParaCLIP, exhibits significant improvements over baseline CLIP models across various tasks, including paraphrased retrieval (with rank similarity scores improved by up to 2.0% and 5.6%), Visual Genome Relation and Attribution, as well as seven semantic textual similarity tasks.