It's Not a Modality Gap: Characterizing and Addressing the Contrastive Gap

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Fahim, Abrar, Murphy, Alex, Fyshe, Alona
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Fahim, Abrar
Murphy, Alex
Fyshe, Alona
author_facet Fahim, Abrar
Murphy, Alex
Fyshe, Alona
contents Multi-modal contrastive models such as CLIP achieve state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot classification by embedding input images and texts on a joint representational space. Recently, a modality gap has been reported in two-encoder contrastive models like CLIP, meaning that the image and text embeddings reside in disjoint areas of the latent space. Previous studies suggest that this gap exists due to 1) the cone effect, 2) mismatched pairs in the dataset, and 3) insufficient training. We show that, even when accounting for all these factors, and even when using the same modality, the contrastive loss actually creates a gap during training. As a result, We propose that the modality gap is inherent to the two-encoder contrastive loss and rename it the contrastive gap. We present evidence that attributes this contrastive gap to low uniformity in CLIP space, resulting in embeddings that occupy only a small portion of the latent space. To close the gap, we adapt the uniformity and alignment properties of unimodal contrastive loss to the multi-modal setting and show that simply adding these terms to the CLIP loss distributes the embeddings more uniformly in the representational space, closing the gap. In our experiments, we show that the modified representational space achieves better performance than default CLIP loss in downstream tasks such as zero-shot image classification and multi-modal arithmetic.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_18570
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle It's Not a Modality Gap: Characterizing and Addressing the Contrastive Gap
Fahim, Abrar
Murphy, Alex
Fyshe, Alona
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Multi-modal contrastive models such as CLIP achieve state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot classification by embedding input images and texts on a joint representational space. Recently, a modality gap has been reported in two-encoder contrastive models like CLIP, meaning that the image and text embeddings reside in disjoint areas of the latent space. Previous studies suggest that this gap exists due to 1) the cone effect, 2) mismatched pairs in the dataset, and 3) insufficient training. We show that, even when accounting for all these factors, and even when using the same modality, the contrastive loss actually creates a gap during training. As a result, We propose that the modality gap is inherent to the two-encoder contrastive loss and rename it the contrastive gap. We present evidence that attributes this contrastive gap to low uniformity in CLIP space, resulting in embeddings that occupy only a small portion of the latent space. To close the gap, we adapt the uniformity and alignment properties of unimodal contrastive loss to the multi-modal setting and show that simply adding these terms to the CLIP loss distributes the embeddings more uniformly in the representational space, closing the gap. In our experiments, we show that the modified representational space achieves better performance than default CLIP loss in downstream tasks such as zero-shot image classification and multi-modal arithmetic.
title It's Not a Modality Gap: Characterizing and Addressing the Contrastive Gap
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18570