It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data

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Main Authors: Schnaus, Dominik, Araslanov, Nikita, Cremers, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Schnaus, Dominik
Araslanov, Nikita
Cremers, Daniel
author_facet Schnaus, Dominik
Araslanov, Nikita
Cremers, Daniel
contents The platonic representation hypothesis suggests that vision and language embeddings become more homogeneous as model and dataset sizes increase. In particular, pairwise distances within each modality become more similar. This suggests that as foundation models mature, it may become possible to match vision and language embeddings in a fully unsupervised fashion, i.e. without parallel data. We present the first feasibility study, and investigate conformity of existing vision and language foundation models in the context of unsupervised, or "blind", matching. First, we formulate unsupervised matching as a quadratic assignment problem and introduce a novel heuristic that outperforms previous solvers. We also develop a technique to find optimal matching problems, for which a non-trivial match is very likely. Second, we conduct an extensive study deploying a range of vision and language models on four datasets. Our analysis reveals that for many problem instances, vision and language representations can be indeed matched without supervision. This finding opens up the exciting possibility of embedding semantic knowledge into other modalities virtually annotation-free. As a proof of concept, we showcase an unsupervised classifier, which achieves non-trivial classification accuracy without any image-text annotation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_24129
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data
Schnaus, Dominik
Araslanov, Nikita
Cremers, Daniel
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
The platonic representation hypothesis suggests that vision and language embeddings become more homogeneous as model and dataset sizes increase. In particular, pairwise distances within each modality become more similar. This suggests that as foundation models mature, it may become possible to match vision and language embeddings in a fully unsupervised fashion, i.e. without parallel data. We present the first feasibility study, and investigate conformity of existing vision and language foundation models in the context of unsupervised, or "blind", matching. First, we formulate unsupervised matching as a quadratic assignment problem and introduce a novel heuristic that outperforms previous solvers. We also develop a technique to find optimal matching problems, for which a non-trivial match is very likely. Second, we conduct an extensive study deploying a range of vision and language models on four datasets. Our analysis reveals that for many problem instances, vision and language representations can be indeed matched without supervision. This finding opens up the exciting possibility of embedding semantic knowledge into other modalities virtually annotation-free. As a proof of concept, we showcase an unsupervised classifier, which achieves non-trivial classification accuracy without any image-text annotation.
title It's a (Blind) Match! Towards Vision-Language Correspondence without Parallel Data
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.24129