# Data-free Multi-label Image Recognition via LLM-powered Prompt Tuning

Source: [Data-free Multi-label Image Recognition via LLM-powered Prompt Tuning](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa72661e209131cea563af>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T02:25:11.364Z

Authors: Shuo Yang, Zirui Shang, Yongqi Wang, Derong Deng, Hongwei Chen, Qiyuan Cheng, Xinxiao Wu

Published: 2024-03-02T13:43:32.000Z

## Abstract

This paper proposes a novel framework for multi-label image recognition without any training data, called data-free framework, which uses knowledge of pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) to learn prompts to adapt pretrained Vision-Language Model (VLM) like CLIP to multilabel classification. Through asking LLM by well-designed questions, we acquire comprehensive knowledge about characteristics and contexts of objects, which provides valuable text descriptions for learning prompts. Then we propose a hierarchical prompt learning method by taking the multi-label dependency into consideration, wherein a subset of category-specific prompt tokens are shared when the corresponding objects exhibit similar attributes or are more likely to co-occur. Benefiting from the remarkable alignment between visual and linguistic semantics of CLIP, the hierarchical prompts learned from text descriptions are applied to perform classification of images during inference. Our framework presents a new way to explore the synergies between multiple pre-trained models for novel category recognition. Extensive experiments on three public datasets (MS-COCO, VOC2007, and NUS-WIDE) demonstrate that our method achieves better results than the state-of-the-art methods, especially outperforming the zero-shot multi-label recognition methods by 4.7% in mAP on MS-COCO.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01209>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.01209.pdf>)
