O-TPT: Orthogonality Constraints for Calibrating Test-time Prompt Tuning in Vision-Language Models

Test-time prompt tuning for vision-language models (VLMs) are getting attention due to their ability to learn with unlabeled data without fine-tuning. Although test-time prompt tuning methods for VLMs can boost accuracy, the resulting models tend to demonstrate poor calibration, which casts doubts on the reliability and trustworthiness of these models. Notably, more attention needs to be devoted to calibrating the test-time prompt tuning in vision-language models. To this end, we propose a new approach, called O-TPT that introduces orthogonality constraints on the textual features corresponding to the learnable prompts for calibrating test-time prompt tuning in VLMsTowards introducing orthogonality constraints, we make the following contributions. First, we uncover new insights behind the suboptimal calibration performance of existing methods relying on textual feature dispersion. Second, we show that imposing a simple orthogonalization of textual features is a more effective approach towards obtaining textual dispersion.We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets with different backbones and baselines. Results indicate that our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art in significantly reducing the overall average calibration error. Also, our method surpasses the zero-shot calibration performance on fine-grained classification tasks. Our code will be made public upon acceptance.