clip-zero-shot-ecommerce-v1

Model Overview

This model is based on OpenAI's CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training) architecture, specifically fine-tuned for high-quality, zero-shot classification in the e-commerce domain. It can classify an image based on a set of text labels (classes) provided at inference time, without needing explicit retraining for those new labels. This is ideal for quickly categorizing new product images into evolving or granular hierarchies (e.g., "Sweaters" vs. "Cashmere Crewneck").

Model Architecture

• Core Architecture: CLIP Model (CLIPModel)
• Components: CLIP consists of two separate encoders:
  1. Vision Transformer (ViT-B/32): Encodes the product image into a high-dimensional vector.
  2. Text Transformer (Modified GPT-2): Encodes the class labels (e.g., "a photo of a dress") into a high-dimensional vector.
• Zero-Shot Classification: The model measures the cosine similarity between the image vector and all candidate text label vectors. The label with the highest similarity score is the predicted class.

Intended Use

• Dynamic Product Tagging: Classifying millions of e-commerce product images into categories (e.g., "Electronics," "Apparel," "Furniture") without training separate classification models.
• Search Relevance: Improving image-based search and product recommendation systems.
• Content Moderation: Identifying specific types of products (e.g., "weapons," "alcohol") based on image and label input.

Limitations and Ethical Considerations

• Zero-Shot Quality: While flexible, its performance is often slightly lower than a fully supervised classification model trained on the exact target classes.
• Prompt Engineering: Classification performance is highly dependent on the quality of the text prompt. Using descriptive prompts (e.g., "A photograph of a men's running shoe") works better than simple nouns ("shoe").
• Computational Cost: Running both the Vision and Text encoders is more computationally intensive than running a single-headed classification model.
• Bias: Inherits any biases present in the massive pre-training image-text pairs, potentially leading to incorrect classifications based on gender, ethnicity, or setting.

Example Code

To classify a product image using zero-shot inference:

from transformers import CLIPProcessor, CLIPModel
from PIL import Image
import torch

# Load model and processor
model_name = "YourOrg/clip-zero-shot-ecommerce-v1"
model = CLIPModel.from_pretrained(model_name)
processor = CLIPProcessor.from_pretrained(model_name)

# 1. Define Candidate Labels
candidate_labels = ["a photo of a ceramic mug", "a photo of a woolen scarf", "a photo of a leather belt"]
text_inputs = processor(text=candidate_labels, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)

# 2. Load the Image (Conceptual - Replace with actual image loading)
# image = Image.open("path/to/product_image.jpg")
dummy_image = Image.new('RGB', (224, 224), color = 'red') 
image_inputs = processor(images=dummy_image, return_tensors="pt")

# 3. Calculate Similarity (Inference)
with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**text_inputs, **image_inputs)

logits_per_image = outputs.logits_per_image  # (1, num_labels)
probs = logits_per_image.softmax(dim=1)

# Find the best match
best_match_index = probs.argmax().item()
predicted_label = candidate_labels[best_match_index]
confidence = probs[0][best_match_index].item()

print(f"Predicted Class: {predicted_label} (Confidence: {confidence:.2f})")