Counterfactual-Driven Zero-Shot Classifier Expansion

Abstract

Zero-shot classifier expansion aims to adapt existing model to new, unseen classes. It utilizes class attributes or textual descriptions to learn a mapping from the semantic space to the classifier's weight space, without requiring new visual training data. However, the learning process for this mapping relies solely on correlating semantic patterns with their corresponding classifier weights and lacks explicit modeling of inter-class differences. This makes it difficult for the model to capture the critical discriminative features required to define classification boundaries. To overcome this limitation, we reframe the problem from a causal perspective and introduce a novel framework driven by counterfactuals. Our method first generates factual descriptions alongside corresponding inter-class counterfactuals to pinpoint the causal attributes essential for classification, then refines these representations via a mutual purification process, and finally leverages a novel separation loss to explicitly push the factual and counterfactual classifier weights apart. This strategy forces the model to forge clearer and more discriminative classification boundaries, achieving more accurate and robust classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.