Decoupling Vision and Language: Codebook Anchored Visual Adaptation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wu, Jason, Zhao, Tianchen, Liu, Chang, Cai, Jiarui, Zhang, Zheng, Li, Zhuowei, Singh, Aaditya, Xu, Xiang, Srivastava, Mani, Wu, Jonathan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Wu, Jason
Zhao, Tianchen
Liu, Chang
Cai, Jiarui
Zhang, Zheng
Li, Zhuowei
Singh, Aaditya
Xu, Xiang
Srivastava, Mani
Wu, Jonathan
author_facet Wu, Jason
Zhao, Tianchen
Liu, Chang
Cai, Jiarui
Zhang, Zheng
Li, Zhuowei
Singh, Aaditya
Xu, Xiang
Srivastava, Mani
Wu, Jonathan
contents Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) use their vision encoders to translate images into representations for downstream reasoning, but the encoders often underperform in domain-specific visual tasks such as medical image diagnosis or fine-grained classification, where representation errors can cascade through the language model, leading to incorrect responses. Existing adaptation methods modify the continuous feature interface between encoder and language model through projector tuning or other parameter-efficient updates, which still couples the two components and requires re-alignment whenever the encoder changes. We introduce CRAFT (Codebook RegulAted Fine-Tuning), a lightweight method that fine-tunes the encoder using a discrete codebook that anchors visual representations to a stable token space, achieving domain adaptation without modifying other parts of the model. This decoupled design allows the adapted encoder to seamlessly boost the performance of LVLMs with different language architectures, as long as they share the same codebook. Empirically, CRAFT achieves an average gain of 13.51% across 10 domain-specific benchmarks such as VQARAD and PlantVillage, while preserving the LLM's linguistic capabilities and outperforming peer methods that operate on continuous tokens.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_19449
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decoupling Vision and Language: Codebook Anchored Visual Adaptation
Wu, Jason
Zhao, Tianchen
Liu, Chang
Cai, Jiarui
Zhang, Zheng
Li, Zhuowei
Singh, Aaditya
Xu, Xiang
Srivastava, Mani
Wu, Jonathan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.10; I.4.8; I.2.6; I.5.1
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) use their vision encoders to translate images into representations for downstream reasoning, but the encoders often underperform in domain-specific visual tasks such as medical image diagnosis or fine-grained classification, where representation errors can cascade through the language model, leading to incorrect responses. Existing adaptation methods modify the continuous feature interface between encoder and language model through projector tuning or other parameter-efficient updates, which still couples the two components and requires re-alignment whenever the encoder changes. We introduce CRAFT (Codebook RegulAted Fine-Tuning), a lightweight method that fine-tunes the encoder using a discrete codebook that anchors visual representations to a stable token space, achieving domain adaptation without modifying other parts of the model. This decoupled design allows the adapted encoder to seamlessly boost the performance of LVLMs with different language architectures, as long as they share the same codebook. Empirically, CRAFT achieves an average gain of 13.51% across 10 domain-specific benchmarks such as VQARAD and PlantVillage, while preserving the LLM's linguistic capabilities and outperforming peer methods that operate on continuous tokens.
title Decoupling Vision and Language: Codebook Anchored Visual Adaptation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.10; I.4.8; I.2.6; I.5.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19449