CovMatch: Cross-Covariance Guided Multimodal Dataset Distillation with Trainable Text Encoder

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Yongmin, Chung, Hye Won
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lee, Yongmin
Chung, Hye Won
author_facet Lee, Yongmin
Chung, Hye Won
contents Multimodal dataset distillation aims to synthesize a small set of image-text pairs that enables efficient training of large-scale vision-language models. While dataset distillation has shown promise in unimodal tasks, extending it to multimodal contrastive learning presents key challenges: learning cross-modal alignment and managing the high computational cost of large encoders. Prior approaches address scalability by freezing the text encoder and update only the image encoder and text projection layer. However, we find this severely limits semantic alignment and becomes a bottleneck for performance scaling. We propose CovMatch, a scalable dataset distillation framework that aligns the cross-covariance of real and synthetic features while regularizing feature distributions within each modality. Unlike prior approaches, CovMatch enables joint optimization of both encoders, leading to stronger cross-modal alignment and improved performance. Evaluated on Flickr30K and COCO, CovMatch outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal distillation methods and achieves up to 6.8% absolute gains in retrieval accuracy using only 500 synthetic pairs.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18583
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CovMatch: Cross-Covariance Guided Multimodal Dataset Distillation with Trainable Text Encoder
Lee, Yongmin
Chung, Hye Won
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Multimodal dataset distillation aims to synthesize a small set of image-text pairs that enables efficient training of large-scale vision-language models. While dataset distillation has shown promise in unimodal tasks, extending it to multimodal contrastive learning presents key challenges: learning cross-modal alignment and managing the high computational cost of large encoders. Prior approaches address scalability by freezing the text encoder and update only the image encoder and text projection layer. However, we find this severely limits semantic alignment and becomes a bottleneck for performance scaling. We propose CovMatch, a scalable dataset distillation framework that aligns the cross-covariance of real and synthetic features while regularizing feature distributions within each modality. Unlike prior approaches, CovMatch enables joint optimization of both encoders, leading to stronger cross-modal alignment and improved performance. Evaluated on Flickr30K and COCO, CovMatch outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal distillation methods and achieves up to 6.8% absolute gains in retrieval accuracy using only 500 synthetic pairs.
title CovMatch: Cross-Covariance Guided Multimodal Dataset Distillation with Trainable Text Encoder
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18583