Prompting Scientific Names for Zero-Shot Species Recognition ...

• Main Authors: Parashar, Shubham, Lin, Zhiqiu, Li, Yanan, Kong, Shu
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2023
• Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition cs.CV; Computation and Language cs.CL; FOS Computer and information sciences; Lepus timidus; mountain hare
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2310.09929; https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09929

Trained on web-scale image-text pairs, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP can recognize images of common objects in a zero-shot fashion. However, it is underexplored how to use CLIP for zero-shot recognition of highly specialized concepts, e.g., species of birds, plants, and animals, for which their scientific names are written in Latin or Greek. Indeed, CLIP performs poorly for zero-shot species recognition with prompts that use scientific names, e.g., "a photo of Lepus Timidus" (which is a scientific name in Latin). Because these names are usually not included in CLIP's training set. To improve performance, prior works propose to use large-language models (LLMs) to generate descriptions (e.g., of species color and shape) and additionally use them in prompts. We find that they bring only marginal gains. Differently, we are motivated to translate scientific names (e.g., Lepus Timidus) to common English names (e.g., mountain hare) and use such in the prompts. We find that common names are more likely ... : EMNLP 2023 ...