Kernel-based Unsupervised Embedding Alignment for Enhanced Visual Representation in Vision-language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gong, Shizhan, Jiang, Yankai, Dou, Qi, Farnia, Farzan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Gong, Shizhan
Jiang, Yankai
Dou, Qi
Farnia, Farzan
author_facet Gong, Shizhan
Jiang, Yankai
Dou, Qi
Farnia, Farzan
contents Vision-language models, such as CLIP, have achieved significant success in aligning visual and textual representations, becoming essential components of many multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) like LLaVA and OpenFlamingo. However, numerous studies have identified CLIP's limited fine-grained perception as a critical drawback, leading to substantial failures in downstream MLLMs. In contrast, vision-centric foundation models like DINOv2 demonstrate remarkable capabilities in capturing fine details from images. In this work, we propose a novel kernel-based method to align CLIP's visual representation with that of DINOv2, ensuring that the resulting embeddings maintain compatibility with text embeddings while enhancing perceptual capabilities. Our alignment objective is designed for efficient stochastic optimization. Following this image-only alignment fine-tuning, the visual encoder retains compatibility with the frozen text encoder and exhibits significant improvements in zero-shot object recognition, fine-grained spatial reasoning, and localization. By integrating the aligned visual encoder, downstream MLLMs also demonstrate enhanced performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_02557
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Kernel-based Unsupervised Embedding Alignment for Enhanced Visual Representation in Vision-language Models
Gong, Shizhan
Jiang, Yankai
Dou, Qi
Farnia, Farzan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-language models, such as CLIP, have achieved significant success in aligning visual and textual representations, becoming essential components of many multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) like LLaVA and OpenFlamingo. However, numerous studies have identified CLIP's limited fine-grained perception as a critical drawback, leading to substantial failures in downstream MLLMs. In contrast, vision-centric foundation models like DINOv2 demonstrate remarkable capabilities in capturing fine details from images. In this work, we propose a novel kernel-based method to align CLIP's visual representation with that of DINOv2, ensuring that the resulting embeddings maintain compatibility with text embeddings while enhancing perceptual capabilities. Our alignment objective is designed for efficient stochastic optimization. Following this image-only alignment fine-tuning, the visual encoder retains compatibility with the frozen text encoder and exhibits significant improvements in zero-shot object recognition, fine-grained spatial reasoning, and localization. By integrating the aligned visual encoder, downstream MLLMs also demonstrate enhanced performance.
title Kernel-based Unsupervised Embedding Alignment for Enhanced Visual Representation in Vision-language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02557