Introducing SyntHesIzed Prompts (SHIP) for Improved Fine-Tuning in AI
In AI, fine-tuning is a crucial step after pre-training. It involves training a model on a smaller, task-specific dataset to make the generalized knowledge from pre-training more applicable to a specific task. However, a common problem is when some classes have no data, making it challenging to train the model effectively.
Researchers have come up with a solution called SyntHesIzed Prompts (SHIP), which utilizes a generative model to synthesize features for categories without data. This is especially useful in situations where collecting real data for certain classes is difficult or impossible.
The key to the success of SHIP lies in using a variational autoencoder (VAE) as the framework. VAEs are easier to train and more effective in low-data scenarios compared to other generative models like GANs. While GANs are known for generating high-quality samples, VAEs are better suited for scenarios with limited data.
The researchers combined SHIP with CLIP, a model developed by OpenAI that learns to understand and generate images from textual descriptions. CLIP has been pretrained on a large-scale dataset and has aligned visual and language representations. By integrating SHIP with CLIP, the researchers were able to extract and reconstruct image features, even for classes without data.
The effectiveness of SHIP was tested in various experiments, including base-to-new generalization, cross-dataset transfer learning, and generalized zero-shot learning. The results showed that SHIP achieved state-of-the-art performance in new classes across different datasets.
In conclusion, SHIP is a novel approach that addresses the challenge of data scarcity for certain classes in AI. It improves the performance of CLIP fine-tuning methods by synthesizing features for categories without data. While there are additional training costs involved, SHIP shows great potential for enhancing the effectiveness of AI models. Future research will explore the applicability of SHIP in dense prediction tasks.
To learn more about SHIP and the research behind it, check out the paper. And don’t forget to join our ML SubReddit, Discord Channel, and Email Newsletter for the latest AI research news and projects.