UniFGVC: Universal Training-Free Few-Shot Fine-Grained Vision Classification via Attribute-Aware Multimodal Retrieval

Abstract

Few-shot fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) aims to discriminate between subtly different categories with very limited data. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) exhibit strong capabilities in both fine-grained visual understanding and open-world category recognition, directly fine-tuning them on few-shot FGVC tasks typically leads to overfitting on sparse samples, which erodes their valuable open-world knowledge and compromises generalization. To fundamentally overcome this limitation, we present UniFGVC, a universal training-free framework that shifts the paradigm from parameter fine-tuning to training-free retrieval-based inference. UniFGVC reframes few-shot FGVC as a multimodal retrieval problem using predefined category templates. Its core is the Category-Discriminative Visual Captioner (CDV-Captioner), an attribute-aware module designed to leverage MLLM for generating structured textual descriptions that explicitly pinpoint discriminative visual attributes between similar classes. By integrating chain-of-thought reasoning and visual references, CDV-Captioner mitigates hallucination and maximizes the discriminative power of textual captions, thereby converting images into attribute-enriched image-description pairs. Subsequently, utilizing arbitrary pre-trained visual and textual encoders in a plug-and-play manner, UniFGVC extracts features from both modalities and computes their similarity with all category templates for recognition. Extensive experiments on 12 FGVC datasets demonstrate UniFGVC's universal compatibility and consistent superiority. It not only outperforms existing few-shot CLIP-based methods but also surpasses several fully-supervised MLLM-based approaches, confirming the general advantage of the proposed retrieval paradigm.