{"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/whitened-clip-as-a-likelihood-surrogate-of","title":"Whitened CLIP as a Likelihood Surrogate of Images and Captions","arxiv_id":"2505.06934","date":"2025-05-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Roy Betser","Meir Yossef Levi","Guy Gilboa"],"abstract":"Likelihood approximations for images are not trivial to compute and can be useful in many applications. We examine the use of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to assess the likelihood of images and captions. We introduce \\textit{Whitened CLIP}, a novel transformation of the CLIP latent space via an invertible linear operation. This transformation ensures that each feature in the embedding space has zero mean, unit standard deviation, and no correlation with all other features, resulting in an identity covariance matrix. We show that the whitened embeddings statistics can be well approximated as a standard normal distribution, thus, the log-likelihood is estimated simply by the square Euclidean norm in the whitened embedding space. The whitening procedure is completely training-free and performed using a pre-computed whitening matrix, hence, is very fast. We present several preliminary experiments demonstrating the properties and applicability of these likelihood scores to images and captions.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06934v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06934v1.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":"whitened-clip-as-a-likelihood-surrogate-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/rbetser/W_CLIP","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"clip","method_name":"CLIP"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.06934","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2505.06934"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/rbetser/W_CLIP","reach":null}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"0dff86da385b94b2","entry":"white_transform","repo":"rbetser/W_CLIP","repo_kind":"official","path":"whitening_code.py","file_url":"https://github.com/rbetser/W_CLIP/blob/HEAD/whitening_code.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"0dff86da385b94b2"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}