Learning Visual Proxy for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Abstract: Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel attribute-object compositions by leveraging knowledge from seen compositions. Existing methods align textual prototypes with visual features through Vision-LLMs (VLMs), but they face two key limitations: (1) modality gaps hinder the discrimination of semantically similar composition pairs, and (2) single-modal textual prototypes lack fine-grained visual cues, creating bottlenecks in VLM-based CZSL. In this paper, we introduce Visual Proxy Learning, a novel approach that facilitates the learning of distinct visual distributions, effectively reducing the modality gap and improving compositional generalization performance. Specifically, we initialize visual proxies for various attributes, objects, and their compositions using text representations. By optimizing the visual space, we capture fine-grained visual cues and guide the learning of more discriminative visual representations for attributes, objects and compositions. Furthermore, we propose an effective Cross-Modal Joint Learning (CMJL) strategy that imposes cross-modal constraints between the original text-image space and the fine-grained visual space. This approach not only boosts generalization for previously unseen composition pairs but also sharpens the discrimination of similar pairs, fostering more robust and precise learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in closed-world scenarios and competitive open-world results across four established CZSL benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of our approach in advancing compositional generalization.