When Semantics Saturate or Emerge: Adaptation-Conditional Semantic Utility in Source-Free Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning
arXiv:2608.06673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language descriptions in source-free cross-domain few-shot learning (SF-CDFSL) are often selected according to zero-shot accuracy obtained with a frozen vision--language model. This paper asks whether that ranking remains valid after target-domain visual adaptation. Under a strictly paired protocol, we compare a generic class-name template with fixed detailed class descriptions before and after visual Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on EuroSAT, CropDisease, ISIC, and ChestX. Let $\deltazero$ and $\deltalora$ denote the Detailed-minus-Base accuracy before and after adaptation, respectively. Two recurring regimes emerge. In \emph{semantic saturation}, $\deltazero>0$ but $00$: on ISIC and ChestX, detailed descriptions become more useful only after the visual representation is updated. Training trajectories and sample-level decomposition show that saturation is driven mainly by Base-LoRA recovering errors already solved by detailed semantics, whereas emergence is associated with prediction turnover and newly formed Detailed-only correct decisions. Fixed-point-free shuffled-semantic controls, a second CLIP backbone, and multiple random seeds support the broad pattern while identifying ChestX 1-shot as a weak boundary case. These findings establish that zero-shot prompt quality is an incomplete proxy for adaptation-anchor quality and motivate evaluating language on both sides of the adaptation boundary.
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[Submitted on 7 Aug 2026]
Title:When Semantics Saturate or Emerge: Adaptation-Conditional Semantic Utility in Source-Free Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning
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Abstract:Language descriptions in source-free cross-domain few-shot learning (SF-CDFSL) are often selected according to zero-shot accuracy obtained with a frozen vision--language model. This paper asks whether that ranking remains valid after target-domain visual adaptation. Under a strictly paired protocol, we compare a generic class-name template with fixed detailed class descriptions before and after visual Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on EuroSAT, CropDisease, ISIC, and ChestX. Let $\deltazero$ and $\deltalora$ denote the Detailed-minus-Base accuracy before and after adaptation, respectively. Two recurring regimes emerge. In \emph{semantic saturation}, $\deltazero>0$ but $00$: on ISIC and ChestX, detailed descriptions become more useful only after the visual representation is updated. Training trajectories and sample-level decomposition show that saturation is driven mainly by Base-LoRA recovering errors already solved by detailed semantics, whereas emergence is associated with prediction turnover and newly formed Detailed-only correct decisions. Fixed-point-free shuffled-semantic controls, a second CLIP backbone, and multiple random seeds support the broad pattern while identifying ChestX 1-shot as a weak boundary case. These findings establish that zero-shot prompt quality is an incomplete proxy for adaptation-anchor quality and motivate evaluating language on both sides of the adaptation boundary.
Comments: 18 pages, 6 figures
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.06673 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2608.06673v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.06673
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Wei Liu Dr [view email] [v1] Fri, 7 Aug 2026 00:38:55 UTC (130 KB)
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