Modest-Align: Data-Efficient Alignment for Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Jiaxiang, Wang, Yuan, Du, Jiawei, Zhou, Joey Tianyi, Xu, Mingkun, Liu, Zuozhu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Liu, Jiaxiang
Wang, Yuan
Du, Jiawei
Zhou, Joey Tianyi
Xu, Mingkun
Liu, Zuozhu
author_facet Liu, Jiaxiang
Wang, Yuan
Du, Jiawei
Zhou, Joey Tianyi
Xu, Mingkun
Liu, Zuozhu
contents Cross-modal alignment aims to map heterogeneous modalities into a shared latent space, as exemplified by models like CLIP, which benefit from large-scale image-text pretraining for strong recognition capabilities. However, when operating in resource-constrained settings with limited or low-quality data, these models often suffer from overconfidence and degraded performance due to the prevalence of ambiguous or weakly correlated image-text pairs. Current contrastive learning approaches, which rely on single positive pairs, further exacerbate this issue by reinforcing overconfidence on uncertain samples. To address these challenges, we propose Modest-Align, a lightweight alignment framework designed for robustness and efficiency. Our approach leverages two complementary strategies -- Random Perturbation, which introduces controlled noise to simulate uncertainty, and Embedding Smoothing, which calibrates similarity distributions in the embedding space. These mechanisms collectively reduce overconfidence and improve performance on noisy or weakly aligned samples. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Modest-Align outperforms state-of-the-art methods in retrieval tasks, achieving competitive results with over 100x less training data and 600x less GPU time than CLIP. Our method offers a practical and scalable solution for cross-modal alignment in real-world, low-resource scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_21606
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modest-Align: Data-Efficient Alignment for Vision-Language Models
Liu, Jiaxiang
Wang, Yuan
Du, Jiawei
Zhou, Joey Tianyi
Xu, Mingkun
Liu, Zuozhu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cross-modal alignment aims to map heterogeneous modalities into a shared latent space, as exemplified by models like CLIP, which benefit from large-scale image-text pretraining for strong recognition capabilities. However, when operating in resource-constrained settings with limited or low-quality data, these models often suffer from overconfidence and degraded performance due to the prevalence of ambiguous or weakly correlated image-text pairs. Current contrastive learning approaches, which rely on single positive pairs, further exacerbate this issue by reinforcing overconfidence on uncertain samples. To address these challenges, we propose Modest-Align, a lightweight alignment framework designed for robustness and efficiency. Our approach leverages two complementary strategies -- Random Perturbation, which introduces controlled noise to simulate uncertainty, and Embedding Smoothing, which calibrates similarity distributions in the embedding space. These mechanisms collectively reduce overconfidence and improve performance on noisy or weakly aligned samples. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Modest-Align outperforms state-of-the-art methods in retrieval tasks, achieving competitive results with over 100x less training data and 600x less GPU time than CLIP. Our method offers a practical and scalable solution for cross-modal alignment in real-world, low-resource scenarios.
title Modest-Align: Data-Efficient Alignment for Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21606