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MoDE: CLIP Data Experts via Clustering (arxiv.org)
1 point by zerojames on Apr 26, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: MoDE trains a model on each cluster of noisy web image-caption data, then combines them by how well each cluster fits the task. Four experts on a small backbone beat larger CLIP models at zero-shot classification for under 35% of their training cost.

Abstract

The success of contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) relies on the supervision from the pairing between images and captions, which tends to be noisy in web-crawled data. We present Mixture of Data Experts (MoDE) and learn a system of CLIP data experts via clustering. Each data expert is trained on one data cluster, being less sensitive to false negative noises in other clusters. At inference time, we ensemble their outputs by applying weights determined through the correlation between task metadata and cluster conditions. To estimate the correlation precisely, the samples in one cluster should be semantically similar, but the number of data experts should still be reasonable for training and inference. As such, we consider the ontology in human language and propose to use fine-grained cluster centers to represent each data expert at a coarse-grained level. Experimental studies show that four CLIP data experts on ViT-B/16 outperform the ViT-L/14 by OpenAI CLIP and OpenCLIP on zero-shot image classification but with less ($<$35\%) training cost. Meanwhile, MoDE can train all data expert asynchronously and can flexibly include new data experts. The code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/MetaCLIP/tree/main/mode.

Jiawei Ma, Po-Yao Huang, Saining Xie, Shang-Wen Li, Luke Zettlemoyer, Shih-Fu Chang, Wen-Tau Yih, Hu Xu
arXiv:2404.16030 · cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Apr 24, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · IEEE CVPR 2024 Camera Ready. Code Link: https://github.com/facebookresearch/MetaCLIP/tree/main/mode

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