{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-the-difference-of-bert-style-and-clip","title":"On the Difference of BERT-style and CLIP-style Text Encoders","arxiv_id":"2306.03678","date":"2023-06-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhihong Chen","Guiming Hardy Chen","Shizhe Diao","Xiang Wan","Benyou Wang"],"abstract":"Masked language modeling (MLM) has been one of the most popular pretraining recipes in natural language processing, e.g., BERT, one of the representative models. Recently, contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) has also attracted attention, especially its vision models that achieve excellent performance on a broad range of vision tasks. However, few studies are dedicated to studying the text encoders learned by CLIP. In this paper, we analyze the difference between BERT-style and CLIP-style text encoders from three experiments: (i) general text understanding, (ii) vision-centric text understanding, and (iii) text-to-image generation. Experimental analyses show that although CLIP-style text encoders underperform BERT-style ones for general text understanding tasks, they are equipped with a unique ability, i.e., synesthesia, for the cross-modal association, which is more similar to the senses of humans.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.03678v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.03678v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-the-difference-of-bert-style-and-clip","repo_url":"https://github.com/zhjohnchan/bert-clip-synesthesia","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-generation","task_name":"Image Generation"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"masked-language-modeling","task_name":"Masked Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"text-to-image-generation-1","task_name":"Text to Image Generation"},{"task_slug":"text-to-image-generation","task_name":"Text-to-Image Generation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"clip","method_name":"CLIP"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2306.03678","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2306.03678","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}