CoME-VL: Scaling Complementary Multi-Encoder Vision-Language Learning
Fuente:
arXiv
Guardado en:
| Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2026
|
| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | |
| Etiquetas: |
Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
|
| _version_ | 1866915913655123968 |
|---|---|
| author | Deria, Ankan Kumar, Komal He, Xilin Razzak, Imran Cholakkal, Hisham Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman |
| author_facet | Deria, Ankan Kumar, Komal He, Xilin Razzak, Imran Cholakkal, Hisham Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman |
| contents | Recent vision-language models (VLMs) typically rely on a single vision encoder trained with contrastive image-text objectives, such as CLIP-style pretraining. While contrastive encoders are effective for cross-modal alignment and retrieval, self-supervised visual encoders often capture richer dense semantics and exhibit stronger robustness on recognition and understanding tasks. In this work, we investigate how to scale the fusion of these complementary visual representations for vision-language modeling. We propose CoME-VL: Complementary Multi-Encoder Vision-Language, a modular fusion framework that integrates a contrastively trained vision encoder with a self-supervised DINO encoder. Our approach performs representation-level fusion by (i) entropy-guided multi-layer aggregation with orthogonality-constrained projections to reduce redundancy, and (ii) RoPE-enhanced cross-attention to align heterogeneous token grids and produce compact fused visual tokens. The fused tokens can be injected into a decoder-only LLM with minimal changes to standard VLM pipelines. Extensive experiments across diverse vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that CoME-VL consistently outperforms single-encoder baselines. In particular, we observe an average improvement of 4.9% on visual understanding tasks and 5.4% on grounding tasks. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO for detection while improving over the baseline by a large margin. Finally, we conduct ablation studies on layer merging, non-redundant feature mixing, and fusion capacity to evaluate how complementary contrastive and self-supervised signals affect VLM performance. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03231 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | CoME-VL: Scaling Complementary Multi-Encoder Vision-Language Learning Deria, Ankan Kumar, Komal He, Xilin Razzak, Imran Cholakkal, Hisham Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Recent vision-language models (VLMs) typically rely on a single vision encoder trained with contrastive image-text objectives, such as CLIP-style pretraining. While contrastive encoders are effective for cross-modal alignment and retrieval, self-supervised visual encoders often capture richer dense semantics and exhibit stronger robustness on recognition and understanding tasks. In this work, we investigate how to scale the fusion of these complementary visual representations for vision-language modeling. We propose CoME-VL: Complementary Multi-Encoder Vision-Language, a modular fusion framework that integrates a contrastively trained vision encoder with a self-supervised DINO encoder. Our approach performs representation-level fusion by (i) entropy-guided multi-layer aggregation with orthogonality-constrained projections to reduce redundancy, and (ii) RoPE-enhanced cross-attention to align heterogeneous token grids and produce compact fused visual tokens. The fused tokens can be injected into a decoder-only LLM with minimal changes to standard VLM pipelines. Extensive experiments across diverse vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that CoME-VL consistently outperforms single-encoder baselines. In particular, we observe an average improvement of 4.9% on visual understanding tasks and 5.4% on grounding tasks. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO for detection while improving over the baseline by a large margin. Finally, we conduct ablation studies on layer merging, non-redundant feature mixing, and fusion capacity to evaluate how complementary contrastive and self-supervised signals affect VLM performance. |
| title | CoME-VL: Scaling Complementary Multi-Encoder Vision-Language Learning |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03231 |