Cross the Gap: Exposing the Intra-modal Misalignment in CLIP via Modality Inversion
Pre-trained multi-modal Vision-Language Models like CLIP are widely used off-the-shelf for a variety of applications. In this paper, we show that the common practice of individually exploiting the text or image encoders of these powerful multi-modal models is highly suboptimal for intra-modal tasks like image-to-image retrieval. We argue that this is inherently due to the CLIP-style inter-modal contrastive loss that does not enforce any intra-modal constraints, leading to what we call intra-modal misalignment. To demonstrate this, we leverage two optimization-based modality inversion techniques that map representations from their input modality to the complementary one without any need for auxiliary data or additional trained adapters. We empirically show that, in the intra-modal tasks of image-to-image and text-to-text retrieval, approaching these tasks inter-modally significantly improves performance with respect to intra-modal baselines on more than fifteen datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate that approaching a native inter-modal task (e.g. zero-shot image classification) intra-modally decreases performance, further validating our findings. Finally, we show that incorporating an intra-modal term in the pre-training objective or narrowing the modality gap between the text and image feature embedding spaces helps reduce the intra-modal misalignment. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/miccunifi/Cross-the-Gap.
Code (1)
Tasks
image-classificationImage ClassificationImage RetrievalRetrievalText RetrievalZero-Shot Image ClassificationMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
IsoCLIP: Decomposing CLIP Projectors for Efficient Intra-modal Alignment
Vision-Language Models like CLIP are extensively used for inter-modal tasks which involve both visual and text modalities. However, when the individual modality encoders are applied to inherently intra-modal tasks like i…
Image RetrievalReevaluating the Intra-Modal Misalignment Hypothesis in CLIP
Recent research suggested that the embeddings produced by CLIP-like contrastive language-image training are suboptimal for image-only tasks. The main theory is that the inter-modal (language-image) alignment loss ignores…
SeMoBridge: Semantic Modality Bridge for Efficient Few-Shot Adaptation of CLIP
While Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) excels at zero-shot tasks by aligning image and text embeddings, its performance in few-shot classification is hindered by a critical limitation: intra-modal misalignme…
FoCLIP: A Feature-Space Misalignment Framework for CLIP-Based Image Manipulation and Detection
The well-aligned attribute of CLIP-based models enables its effective application like CLIPscore as a widely adopted image quality assessment metric. However, such a CLIP-based metric is vulnerable for its delicate multi…
Image Quality AssessmentImage ManipulationReCLIP: Refine Contrastive Language Image Pre-Training with Source Free Domain Adaptation
Large-scale Pre-Training Vision-Language Model such as CLIP has demonstrated outstanding performance in zero-shot classification, e.g. achieving 76.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet without seeing any example, which leads to…
Domain Adaptationimage-classificationImage ClassificationLanguage Modeling+4