CoME-VL: Scaling Complementary Multi-Encoder Vision-Language Learning
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.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
The Compression Gap: Why Discrete Tokenization Limits Vision-Language-Action Model Scaling
Scaling Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models by upgrading the vision encoder is expected to improve downstream manipulation performance--as it does in vision-language modeling. We show that this expectation fails when act…
Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining
The visual world offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models beyond language. Despite growing interest in this direction, the design space for native multimodal models remains opaque. We provide empirical clar…
Are Bigger Encoders Always Better in Vision Large Models?
In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential in real-world applications. They are developing rapidly due to their remarkable ability to comprehend multimodal information and their…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelMoE-ViE: Mixture of Experts Vision Encoder for Efficient Image and Video Understanding
Vision encoders are a critical component of vision-language models, and scaling their capacity effectively improves performance. However, dense scaling increases compute cost and inference latency. Mixture-of-Experts (Mo…
Separating Representation from Reconstruction Enables Scalable Text Encoders
While decoders have rapidly scaled, encoders have remained largely unchanged since BERT. We revisit this disparity by frozen backbone evaluation via probing. Under this lens, the representations of BERT encoders become i…
Representation Learning