Papers › I0T: Embedding Standardization Method Towards Zero Modality Gap

I0T: Embedding Standardization Method Towards Zero Modality Gap

18 Dec 2024arXiv:2412.14384archive 2025-07-28

Na Min An, Eunki Kim, James Thorne, Hyunjung Shim

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) enables zero-shot inference in downstream tasks such as image-text retrieval and classification. However, recent works extending CLIP suffer from the issue of modality gap, which arises when the image and text embeddings are projected to disparate manifolds, deviating from the intended objective of image-text contrastive learning. We discover that this phenomenon is linked to the modality-specific characteristic that each image/text encoder independently possesses and propose two methods to address the modality gap: (1) a post-hoc embedding standardization method, I0Tₚₒₛₜ that reduces the modality gap approximately to zero and (2) a trainable method, I0T_(async), to alleviate the modality gap problem by adding two normalization layers for each encoder. Our I0T framework can significantly reduce the modality gap while preserving the original embedding representations of trained models with their locked parameters. In practice, I0Tₚₒₛₜ can serve as an alternative explainable automatic evaluation metric of widely used CLIPScore (CLIP-S).

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Contrastive LearningImage-text RetrievalText Retrieval

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CLIP

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