The Professor: Multi-Teacher Unsupervised Prompt Distillation for Vision-Language Models

The article introduces TheProfessor, a multi-teacher unsupervised prompt distillation method that enhances the compression of vision-language models (VLMs) by utilizing a two-teacher ensemble approach. This method employs a domain-finetuned PromptSRC ViT-L/14 and a zero-shot EVA-CLIP-L/14, demonstrating that confidence-weighted ensembling yields significant performance improvements on various datasets, with an average HM increase from 87.52 to 89.28. This advancement is particularly relevant for practitioners as it highlights the effectiveness of multi-teacher strategies in adapting models to domain shifts, potentially leading to better generalization in real-world applications.