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Seeing Through Words, Speaking Through Pixels: Deep Representational Alignment Between Vision and Language Models

Recent studies show that deep vision-only and language-only models--trained on disjoint modalities--nonetheless project their inputs into a partially aligned representational space. Yet we still lack a clear picture of where in each network this convergence emerges, what visual or linguistic cues support it, whether it captures human preferences in many-to-many image-text scenarios, and how aggregating exemplars of the same concept affects alignment. Here, we systematically investigate these questions. We find that alignment peaks in mid-to-late layers of both model types, reflecting a shift from modality-specific to conceptually shared representations. This alignment is robust to appearance-only changes but collapses when semantics are altered (e.g., object removal or word-order scrambling), highlighting that the shared code is truly semantic. Moving beyond the one-to-one image-caption paradigm, a forced-choice "Pick-a-Pic" task shows that human preferences for image-caption matches are mirrored in the embedding spaces across all vision-language model pairs. This pattern holds bidirectionally when multiple captions correspond to a single image, demonstrating that models capture fine-grained semantic distinctions akin to human judgments. Surprisingly, averaging embeddings across exemplars amplifies alignment rather than blurring detail. Together, our results demonstrate that unimodal networks converge on a shared semantic code that aligns with human judgments and strengthens with exemplar aggregation.

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