S-CLIP: Semi-supervised Vision-Language Pre-training using Few Specialist Captions

Vision-language models, such as contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP), have demonstrated impressive results in natural image domains. However, these models often struggle when applied to specialized domains like remote sensing, and adapting to such domains is challenging due to the limited number of image-text pairs available for training. To address this, we propose S-CLIP, a semi-supervised learning method for training CLIP that utilizes additional unpaired images. S-CLIP employs two pseudo-labeling strategies specifically designed for contrastive learning and the language modality. The caption-level pseudo-label is given by a combination of captions of paired images, obtained by solving an optimal transport problem between unpaired and paired images. The keyword-level pseudo-label is given by a keyword in the caption of the nearest paired image, trained through partial label learning that assumes a candidate set of labels for supervision instead of the exact one. By combining these objectives, S-CLIP significantly enhances the training of CLIP using only a few image-text pairs, as demonstrated in various specialist domains, including remote sensing, fashion, scientific figures, and comics. For instance, S-CLIP improves CLIP by 10% for zero-shot classification and 4% for image-text retrieval on the remote sensing benchmark, matching the performance of supervised CLIP while using three times fewer image-text pairs.