StructXLIP: Enhancing Vision-language Models with Multimodal Structural Cues

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ruan, Zanxi, Gao, Songqun, Kong, Qiuyu, Wang, Yiming, Cristani, Marco
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Ruan, Zanxi
Gao, Songqun
Kong, Qiuyu
Wang, Yiming
Cristani, Marco
author_facet Ruan, Zanxi
Gao, Songqun
Kong, Qiuyu
Wang, Yiming
Cristani, Marco
contents Edge-based representations are fundamental cues for visual understanding, a principle rooted in early vision research and still central today. We extend this principle to vision-language alignment, showing that isolating and aligning structural cues across modalities can greatly benefit fine-tuning on long, detail-rich captions, with a specific focus on improving cross-modal retrieval. We introduce StructXLIP, a fine-tuning alignment paradigm that extracts edge maps (e.g., Canny), treating them as proxies for the visual structure of an image, and filters the corresponding captions to emphasize structural cues, making them "structure-centric". Fine-tuning augments the standard alignment loss with three structure-centric losses: (i) aligning edge maps with structural text, (ii) matching local edge regions to textual chunks, and (iii) connecting edge maps to color images to prevent representation drift. From a theoretical standpoint, while standard CLIP maximizes the mutual information between visual and textual embeddings, StructXLIP additionally maximizes the mutual information between multimodal structural representations. This auxiliary optimization is intrinsically harder, guiding the model toward more robust and semantically stable minima, enhancing vision-language alignment. Beyond outperforming current competitors on cross-modal retrieval in both general and specialized domains, our method serves as a general boosting recipe that can be integrated into future approaches in a plug-and-play manner. Code and pretrained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/intelligolabs/StructXLIP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_20089
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle StructXLIP: Enhancing Vision-language Models with Multimodal Structural Cues
Ruan, Zanxi
Gao, Songqun
Kong, Qiuyu
Wang, Yiming
Cristani, Marco
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Edge-based representations are fundamental cues for visual understanding, a principle rooted in early vision research and still central today. We extend this principle to vision-language alignment, showing that isolating and aligning structural cues across modalities can greatly benefit fine-tuning on long, detail-rich captions, with a specific focus on improving cross-modal retrieval. We introduce StructXLIP, a fine-tuning alignment paradigm that extracts edge maps (e.g., Canny), treating them as proxies for the visual structure of an image, and filters the corresponding captions to emphasize structural cues, making them "structure-centric". Fine-tuning augments the standard alignment loss with three structure-centric losses: (i) aligning edge maps with structural text, (ii) matching local edge regions to textual chunks, and (iii) connecting edge maps to color images to prevent representation drift. From a theoretical standpoint, while standard CLIP maximizes the mutual information between visual and textual embeddings, StructXLIP additionally maximizes the mutual information between multimodal structural representations. This auxiliary optimization is intrinsically harder, guiding the model toward more robust and semantically stable minima, enhancing vision-language alignment. Beyond outperforming current competitors on cross-modal retrieval in both general and specialized domains, our method serves as a general boosting recipe that can be integrated into future approaches in a plug-and-play manner. Code and pretrained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/intelligolabs/StructXLIP.
title StructXLIP: Enhancing Vision-language Models with Multimodal Structural Cues
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20089