Can Synthetic Images Serve as Effective and Efficient Class Prototypes?

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in zero-shot image classification tasks. However, existing methods, including Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), all rely on annotated text-to-image pairs for aligning visual and textual modalities. This dependency introduces substantial cost and accuracy requirement in preparing high-quality datasets. At the same time, processing data from two modes also requires dual-tower encoders for most models, which also hinders their lightweight. To address these limitations, we introduce a ``Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training via Large-Language-Model-based Generation (LGCLIP)" framework. LGCLIP leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate class-specific prompts that guide a diffusion model in synthesizing reference images. Afterwards these generated images serve as visual prototypes, and the visual features of real images are extracted and compared with the visual features of these prototypes to achieve comparative prediction. By optimizing prompt generation through the LLM and employing only a visual encoder, LGCLIP remains lightweight and efficient. Crucially, our framework requires only class labels as input during whole experimental procedure, eliminating the need for manually annotated image-text pairs and extra pre-processing. Experimental results validate the feasibility and efficiency of LGCLIP, demonstrating great performance in zero-shot classification tasks and establishing a novel paradigm for classification.

"You Are Rejected!": An Empirical Study of Large Language Models Taking Hiring Evaluations

With the proliferation of the internet and the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence, leading technology companies face an urgent annual demand for a considerable number of software and algorithm engineers. To efficiently and effectively identify high-potential candidates from thousands of applicants, these firms have established a multi-stage selection process, which crucially includes a standardized hiring evaluation designed to assess job-specific competencies. Motivated by the demonstrated prowess of Large Language Models (LLMs) in coding and reasoning tasks, this paper investigates a critical question: Can LLMs successfully pass these hiring evaluations? To this end, we conduct a comprehensive examination of a widely used professional assessment questionnaire. We employ state-of-the-art LLMs to generate responses and subsequently evaluate their performance. Contrary to any prior expectation of LLMs being ideal engineers, our analysis reveals a significant inconsistency between the model-generated answers and the company-referenced solutions. Our empirical findings lead to a striking conclusion: All evaluated LLMs fails to pass the hiring evaluation.