CV-DCLR: Causal-Visual Dynamic Label Refinement for Robust Zero-Shot Learning

Can Wang, Jiangnan Li, Mingyu Li, Yining Song, Kangrui Ren, Min Gan, Jinfu Fan

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) facilitates knowledge transfer via shared semantic spaces. However, a critical bottleneck in this paradigm is Semantic Entanglement, where visual representations are inevitably conflated with visually similar semantic concepts, such as distinguishing the intrinsic traits of a Wolf from the shared features of a Husky. Existing global alignment methods often indiscriminately maximize correlations between visual and semantic modalities, leading models to overfit spurious similarities rather than capturing distinctive class identities. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose the Causal-Visual Dynamic Label Refinement (CV-DCLR) framework. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on superficial visual statistics, CV-DCLR recalibrates visual-semantic associations via a Dual-Stream Mutual Correction Mechanism. This includes a Visual Likelihood Stream to model observational patterns and a Causal Importance Stream that verifies the structural necessity of candidate prototypes through Counterfactual Intervention. Acting as a logical filter, our adaptive gating mechanism dynamically modulates feature responses to amplify genuine causal traits while suppressing visually plausible but structurally irrelevant distractors. Extensive experiments on the CUB, SUN, and AWA2 benchmarks under a rigorous Semantic Entanglement Injection protocol demonstrate that CV-DCLR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in high-ambiguity scenarios. Specifically, while existing models suffer catastrophic degradation under entanglement, our framework maintains robust performance, effectively disentangling true class identities from semantic confounders.