Refiner: Fine-grained Cross-modal Concepts Refinement for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Recent Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) methods increasingly adopt the pre-trained vision-language models to capture the contextual relations between image and text spaces. However, the single-class-token design from Transformer-based encoder inevitably captures contextual information from unrelated objects and background, thus hindering the modeling of fine-grained class-specific visual features. Suffering from cross-modal gap, prior methods also struggle to improve compositional recognition performance. To address these issues, we propose a fine-grained cross-modal concepts refinement framework, termed as Refiner, which comprises two pivotal components: (i) the fine-grained concepts refinement of image embeddings to capture state-object context within visual scenes, and (ii) the cross-modal information fusion to mitigate the modality gap. By leveraging learnable query vectors to capture region-specific semantic information pertinent to composition labels, our approach refines visual representations with fine-grained state-object context information. As for cross-modal information fusion, we construct a robust image-to-text mapping by aligning visual embeddings with states, objects, and compositions, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Refiner achieves new state-of-the-art performance across all popular benchmarks in both closed- and open-world settings.