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keywords:
cv
language and vision
Accurately describing images via text is a foundation of interpretable AI. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have recently addressed this by aligning images and texts in a shared embedding space, enhancing the correlation between visual elements and corresponding texts. VLMs' performance can be further boosted with descriptions generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it is difficult to determine the contribution of actual description semantics, as the performance gain may also stem from a semantic-agnostic ensembling effect. Considering this, we ask how to distinguish the actual discriminative power of descriptions from performance boosts that potentially rely on an ensembling effect. To study this, we propose an alternative evaluation scenario that shows a characteristic behavior if the discriminative power of used descriptions is present. Furthermore, we propose a training-free method to select discriminative descriptions that work independently of class name ensembling effects. The training-free method works in the following way: A test image has a local CLIP label neighborhood, i.e., its top-k label predictions. Then, w.r.t. to a small selection set, we extract descriptions that distinguish each class well in the local neighborhood. Using the selected descriptions, we demonstrate improved classification accuracy across seven datasets and provide in-depth analysis and insights into the interpretability of description-based image classification by VLMs Code will be published in the camera-ready version.