# Language as a Label: Zero-Shot Multimodal Classification of Everyday Postures under Data Scarcity Source: [Language as a Label: Zero-Shot Multimodal Classification of Everyday Postures under Data Scarcity]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T05:58:13.123Z Authors: MingZe Tang, Jubal Chandy Jacob Published: 2025-10-15T09:53:46.000Z ## Abstract Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable zero-shot classification by aligning images and text in a shared space, a promising approach for data-scarce conditions. However, the influence of prompt design on recognizing visually similar categories, such as human postures, is not well understood. This study investigates how prompt specificity affects the zero-shot classification of sitting, standing, and walking/running on a small, 285-image COCO-derived dataset. A suite of modern VLMs, including OpenCLIP, MetaCLIP 2, and SigLip, were evaluated using a three-tiered prompt design that systematically increases linguistic detail. Our findings reveal a compelling, counter-intuitive trend: for the highest-performing models (MetaCLIP 2 and OpenCLIP), the simplest, most basic prompts consistently achieve the best results. Adding descriptive detail significantly degrades performance for instance, MetaCLIP 2's multi-class accuracy drops from 68.8\\% to 55.1\\% a phenomenon we term "prompt overfitting". Conversely, the lower-performing SigLip model shows improved classification on ambiguous classes when given more descriptive, body-cue-based prompts. ## 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]() [PDF]()