Adapting Without Seeing: Text-Aided Domain Adaptation for Adapting CLIP-like Models to Novel Domains

This paper addresses the challenge of adapting large vision models, such as CLIP, to domain shifts in image classification tasks. While these models, pre-trained on vast datasets like LAION 2B, offer powerful visual representations, they may struggle when applied to domains significantly different from their training data, such as industrial applications. We introduce TADA, a Text-Aided Domain Adaptation method that adapts the visual representations of these models to new domains without requiring target domain images. TADA leverages verbal descriptions of the domain shift to capture the differences between the pre-training and target domains. Our method integrates seamlessly with fine-tuning strategies, including prompt learning methods. We demonstrate TADA’s effectiveness in improving the performance of large vision models on domain-shifted data, achieving state-of-the-art results on benchmarks like DomainNet.