  Vision and Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have enabled visual
recognition of a potentially unlimited set of categories described by text
prompts. However, for the best visual recognition performance, these models
still require tuning to better fit the data distributions of the downstream
tasks, in order to overcome the domain shift from the web-based pre-training
data. Recently, it has been shown that it is possible to effectively tune VLMs
without any paired data, and in particular to effectively improve VLMs visual
recognition performance using text-only training data generated by Large
Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we dive deeper into this exciting
text-only VLM training approach and explore ways it can be significantly
further improved taking the specifics of the downstream task into account when
sampling text data from LLMs. In particular, compared to the SOTA text-only VLM
training approach, we demonstrate up to 8.4% performance improvement in (cross)
domain-specific adaptation, up to 8.7% improvement in fine-grained recognition,
and 3.1% overall average improvement in zero-shot classification compared to
strong baselines.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition