Post-pre-training for Modality Alignment in Vision-Language Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Yamaguchi, Shin'ya, Feng, Dewei, Kanai, Sekitoshi, Adachi, Kazuki, Chijiwa, Daiki
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Yamaguchi, Shin'ya
Feng, Dewei
Kanai, Sekitoshi
Adachi, Kazuki
Chijiwa, Daiki
author_facet Yamaguchi, Shin'ya
Feng, Dewei
Kanai, Sekitoshi
Adachi, Kazuki
Chijiwa, Daiki
contents Contrastive language image pre-training (CLIP) is an essential component of building modern vision-language foundation models. While CLIP demonstrates remarkable zero-shot performance on downstream tasks, the multi-modal feature spaces still suffer from a modality gap, which is a gap between image and text feature clusters and limits downstream task performance. Although existing works attempt to address the modality gap by modifying pre-training or fine-tuning, they struggle with heavy training costs with large datasets or degradations of zero-shot performance. This paper presents CLIP-Refine, a post-pre-training method for CLIP models at a phase between pre-training and fine-tuning. CLIP-Refine aims to align the feature space with 1 epoch training on small image-text datasets without zero-shot performance degradations. To this end, we introduce two techniques: random feature alignment (RaFA) and hybrid contrastive-distillation (HyCD). RaFA aligns the image and text features to follow a shared prior distribution by minimizing the distance to random reference vectors sampled from the prior. HyCD updates the model with hybrid soft labels generated by combining ground-truth image-text pair labels and outputs from the pre-trained CLIP model. This contributes to achieving both maintaining the past knowledge and learning new knowledge to align features. Our extensive experiments with multiple classification and retrieval tasks show that CLIP-Refine succeeds in mitigating the modality gap and improving the zero-shot performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_12717
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Post-pre-training for Modality Alignment in Vision-Language Foundation Models
Yamaguchi, Shin'ya
Feng, Dewei
Kanai, Sekitoshi
Adachi, Kazuki
Chijiwa, Daiki
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Contrastive language image pre-training (CLIP) is an essential component of building modern vision-language foundation models. While CLIP demonstrates remarkable zero-shot performance on downstream tasks, the multi-modal feature spaces still suffer from a modality gap, which is a gap between image and text feature clusters and limits downstream task performance. Although existing works attempt to address the modality gap by modifying pre-training or fine-tuning, they struggle with heavy training costs with large datasets or degradations of zero-shot performance. This paper presents CLIP-Refine, a post-pre-training method for CLIP models at a phase between pre-training and fine-tuning. CLIP-Refine aims to align the feature space with 1 epoch training on small image-text datasets without zero-shot performance degradations. To this end, we introduce two techniques: random feature alignment (RaFA) and hybrid contrastive-distillation (HyCD). RaFA aligns the image and text features to follow a shared prior distribution by minimizing the distance to random reference vectors sampled from the prior. HyCD updates the model with hybrid soft labels generated by combining ground-truth image-text pair labels and outputs from the pre-trained CLIP model. This contributes to achieving both maintaining the past knowledge and learning new knowledge to align features. Our extensive experiments with multiple classification and retrieval tasks show that CLIP-Refine succeeds in mitigating the modality gap and improving the zero-shot performance.
title Post-pre-training for Modality Alignment in Vision-Language Foundation Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12717