cs.LGJul 23, 2023

Geometry-Aware Adaptation for Pretrained Models

Authors: Nicholas Roberts, Xintong Li, Dyah Adila, Sonia Cromp, Tzu-Heng Huang, Jitian Zhao, Frederic Sala

Organizations: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Abstract

Machine learning models -- including prominent zero-shot models -- are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit this information to adapt the trained model to reliably predict new classes -- or, in the case of zero-shot prediction, to improve its performance -- without any additional training. Our technique is a drop-in replacement of the standard prediction rule, swapping argmax with the Fréchet mean. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for this approach, studying (i) learning-theoretic results trading off label space diameter, sample complexity, and model dimension, (ii) characterizations of the full range of scenarios in which it is possible to predict any unobserved class, and (iii) an optimal active learning-like next class selection procedure to obtain optimal training classes for when it is not possible to predict the entire range of unobserved classes. Empirically, using easily-available external metrics, our proposed approach, Loki, gains up to 29.7% relative improvement over SimCLR on ImageNet and scales to hundreds of thousands of classes. When no such metric is available, Loki can use self-derived metrics from class embeddings and obtains a 10.5% improvement on pretrained zero-shot models such as CLIP.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables8 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Label Shift Aware Adaptation for Online Zero-shot Learning with Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP)

    Jun 13, 2026Pengxiao Han, Changkun Ye, Yanshuo Wang +5Domain AdaptationZero-Shot

  2. Zero-Shot Neural Network Evaluation with Sample-Wise Activation Patterns

    May 8, 2026Yameng Peng, Andy Song, HaythamM. Fayek +2Zero-ShotConvolutional Neural Networks

  3. Multi-Label Test-Time Adaptation with Bayesian Conditional Priors

    Jun 11, 2026Qiru Li, Ao Zhou, Zhiwei Jiang +4Vision-Language Model AdaptationMulti-Label Classification