Unconstrained Open Vocabulary Image Classification: Zero-Shot Transfer from Text to Image via CLIP Inversion

TL;DR

NOVIC is a real-time, unconstrained open vocabulary image classifier that uses a transformer to generate labels from images without predefined class lists, enabling zero-shot transfer from text to images.

Contribution

It introduces an object decoder trained on large datasets to invert CLIP embeddings, allowing label generation directly from image features without prior class knowledge.

Findings

Achieves up to 87.5% accuracy on standard benchmarks.

Operates without predefined class labels or context.

Supports zero-shot transfer from text to image classification.

Abstract

We introduce NOVIC, an innovative real-time uNconstrained Open Vocabulary Image Classifier that uses an autoregressive transformer to generatively output classification labels as language. Leveraging the extensive knowledge of CLIP models, NOVIC harnesses the embedding space to enable zero-shot transfer from pure text to images. Traditional CLIP models, despite their ability for open vocabulary classification, require an exhaustive prompt of potential class labels, restricting their application to images of known content or context. To address this, we propose an "object decoder" model that is trained on a large-scale 92M-target dataset of templated object noun sets and LLM-generated captions to always output the object noun in question. This effectively inverts the CLIP text encoder and allows textual object labels from essentially the entire English language to be generated directly from image-derived embedding vectors, without requiring any a priori knowledge of the potential content of an image, and without any label biases. The trained decoders are tested on a mix of manually and web-curated datasets, as well as standard image classification benchmarks, and achieve fine-grained prompt-free prediction scores of up to 87.5%, a strong result considering the model must work for any conceivable image and without any contextual clues.