PRiSM: Prototype Regularization for Few-Shot VLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17820v2
• Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:33:19 GMT
• Title: PRiSM: Prototype Regularization for Few-Shot VLMs
• Abstract summary: Training-free few-shot adaptation methods have gained significant attention recently in the context of Vision-language Models.<n>We introduce PRiSM, a class-prototype regularization that can be deployed as a plug and play module on top of any existing baseline method.<n>Extensive experiments show that PRiSM improves several training-free baselines, with large gains when dealing with severe class imbalance and high numbers of classes.
• Score: 32.74737063872657
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Training-free few-shot adaptation methods have gained significant attention recently in the context of Vision-language Models (VLMs). Yet, current benchmarks rely on strong assumptions about the statistics of the adaptation data, e.g., class balance. We question these simplifying assumptions and introduce a more realistic benchmark that varies both the levels of class balance and the effective number of classes in few-shot tasks via Dirichlet sampling. Surprisingly, under our setting, we observe substantial drops in the performances of state-of-the-art methods, more so when the number of labeled samples increases. To mitigate this, we introduce PRiSM, a class-prototype regularization that can be deployed as a plug and play module on top of any existing baseline method, significantly improving performances. Our method optimizes a novel multi-term loss, which includes a regularizer maximizing inter-class pairwise distances, along with additional terms promoting support-feature alignment and fidelity to the baseline prototypes. Furthermore, we introduce an effective and computationally efficient block Majorize-Minimize optimizer for our objective. More specifically, we derive a valid blockwise Lipschitz constant (i.e., a bound on the Hessian's spectral norm), which can be computed efficiently via the Gershgorin circle theorem. Extensive experiments show that PRiSM improves several training-free baselines, with large gains when dealing with severe class imbalance and high numbers of classes.

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