Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP): How Joint Multi-Modal Embeddings Bridge Vision and Language
Before 2021, computer vision models were largely constrained by closed-set supervised classification. Deep convolutional networks like ResNet were trained to predict one of exactly 1,000 discrete categories on ImageNet via a final linear layer and a softmax cross-entropy objective. This setup created rigid models: classifying an unencountered category or adapting to downstream domain shifts required throwing away the classification head, collecting thousands of labeled samples, and retraining or
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