TTD: Text-Tag Self-Distillation Enhancing Image-Text Alignment in CLIP to Alleviate Single Tag Bias

Abstract

We identify a critical bias in contemporary CLIP-based models, which we denote as single tag bias. This bias manifests as a disproportionate focus on a singular tag (word) while neglecting other pertinent tags, stemming from CLIP embeddings prioritizing one specific tag in image-text relationships. In this paper, we introduce a novel two-step fine-tuning approach, Text-Tag Self-Distillation (TTD), to address this challenge. We first extract all image-relevant tags from text based on their similarity to the nearest pixels. Then, we distill a combined mask containing the extracted tags’ content to a text-derived mask. This approach ensures the unbiased image-text alignment of the CLIP-based models using only image-text pairs without necessitating additional supervision. Our technique demonstrates model-agnostic improvements in multi-tag classification and segmentation tasks, surpassing competing methods that rely on external resources. The code and data are available at https://github.com/shjo-april/ TTD.