Abstract
Few-shot learning (FSL) often requires effective adaptation of models using limited labeled data. However, most existing FSL methods rely on entangled representations, requiring the model to implicitly recover the unmixing process to obtain disentangled representations using only limited supervision, which hinders effective adaptation. Recent theoretical studies show that multimodal contrastive learning methods, such as CLIP, can disentangle latent representations up to linear transformations. In light of this, we propose the Causal CLIP Adapter (CCA), a novel framework that explicitly disentangles visual features extracted from CLIP using unsupervised Independent Component Analysis (ICA). This removes the need to learn the unmixing process from the labeled data, thereby reducing the number of trainable parameters and mitigating overfitting. Taking a step further, while ICA can obtain visual disentangled representations, it may also disrupt CLIP's intra- and inter-modal alignment. To c