Distill CLIP (DCLIP): Enhancing Image-Text Retrieval via Cross-Modal Transformer Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Csizmadia, Daniel, Codreanu, Andrei, Sim, Victor, Prabhu, Vighnesh, Lu, Michael, Zhu, Kevin, O'Brien, Sean, Sharma, Vasu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Csizmadia, Daniel
Codreanu, Andrei
Sim, Victor
Prabhu, Vighnesh
Lu, Michael
Zhu, Kevin
O'Brien, Sean
Sharma, Vasu
author_facet Csizmadia, Daniel
Codreanu, Andrei
Sim, Victor
Prabhu, Vighnesh
Lu, Michael
Zhu, Kevin
O'Brien, Sean
Sharma, Vasu
contents We present Distill CLIP (DCLIP), a fine-tuned variant of the CLIP model that enhances multimodal image-text retrieval while preserving the original model's strong zero-shot classification capabilities. CLIP models are typically constrained by fixed image resolutions and limited context, which can hinder their effectiveness in retrieval tasks that require fine-grained cross-modal understanding. DCLIP addresses these challenges through a meta teacher-student distillation framework, where a cross-modal transformer teacher is fine-tuned to produce enriched embeddings via bidirectional cross-attention between YOLO-extracted image regions and corresponding textual spans. These semantically and spatially aligned global representations guide the training of a lightweight student model using a hybrid loss that combines contrastive learning and cosine similarity objectives. Despite being trained on only ~67,500 samples curated from MSCOCO, Flickr30k, and Conceptual Captions-just a fraction of CLIP's original dataset-DCLIP significantly improves image-text retrieval metrics (Recall@K, MAP), while retaining approximately 94% of CLIP's zero-shot classification performance. These results demonstrate that DCLIP effectively mitigates the trade-off between task specialization and generalization, offering a resource-efficient, domain-adaptive, and detail-sensitive solution for advanced vision-language tasks. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DCLIP-B772/README.md.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_21549
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distill CLIP (DCLIP): Enhancing Image-Text Retrieval via Cross-Modal Transformer Distillation
Csizmadia, Daniel
Codreanu, Andrei
Sim, Victor
Prabhu, Vighnesh
Lu, Michael
Zhu, Kevin
O'Brien, Sean
Sharma, Vasu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
We present Distill CLIP (DCLIP), a fine-tuned variant of the CLIP model that enhances multimodal image-text retrieval while preserving the original model's strong zero-shot classification capabilities. CLIP models are typically constrained by fixed image resolutions and limited context, which can hinder their effectiveness in retrieval tasks that require fine-grained cross-modal understanding. DCLIP addresses these challenges through a meta teacher-student distillation framework, where a cross-modal transformer teacher is fine-tuned to produce enriched embeddings via bidirectional cross-attention between YOLO-extracted image regions and corresponding textual spans. These semantically and spatially aligned global representations guide the training of a lightweight student model using a hybrid loss that combines contrastive learning and cosine similarity objectives. Despite being trained on only ~67,500 samples curated from MSCOCO, Flickr30k, and Conceptual Captions-just a fraction of CLIP's original dataset-DCLIP significantly improves image-text retrieval metrics (Recall@K, MAP), while retaining approximately 94% of CLIP's zero-shot classification performance. These results demonstrate that DCLIP effectively mitigates the trade-off between task specialization and generalization, offering a resource-efficient, domain-adaptive, and detail-sensitive solution for advanced vision-language tasks. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DCLIP-B772/README.md.
title Distill CLIP (DCLIP): Enhancing Image-Text Retrieval via Cross-Modal Transformer Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21549