The paper introduces a framework that aligns multimodal embeddings with language by using captioning functions on interpretable auxiliary data, a soft contrastive loss, and a rank-based concept retrieval task. Applied to Earth observation embeddings, the method improves species distribution modelling, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on most metrics and better concept retrieval than prior vision‑language models. The aligned concepts enable recovery of species‑habitat associations and allow domain experts to interpret model predictions in natural language.
arXiv:2608. 19825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical image captioning is a technique that accelerates early-stage diagnostic workflows and enhances the interpretability of medical diagnostic AI systems.
arXiv:2506. 08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways.
The paper introduces Lens, a training‑free framework that aligns multimodal representations with the semantic perspective required by downstream tasks. Lens uses a task‑specific readout phrase to anchor the perspective and then aggregates token states after the full input, ensuring the extracted representation reflects task‑conditioned evidence integration rather than generic salient content. The method achieves a Precision@1 of 63.9 across 36 MMEB datasets, outperforming the nearest training‑free baseline by 10.2 points.
arXiv:2606. 15134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched.
arXiv:2608. 03826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Geospatial and urban applications increasingly require models to compare heterogeneous evidence across street-view imagery, remote-sensing observations, text descriptions, region proposals, and temporal change cues.
UniFGVC introduces a training‑free framework for few‑shot fine‑grained visual classification that reframes the task as a multimodal retrieval problem. It uses a Category‑Discriminative Visual Captioner to generate attribute‑aware textual descriptions, then matches image‑description pairs with category templates via pre‑trained encoders. Experiments on 12 datasets show that UniFGVC consistently outperforms existing CLIP‑based and fully‑supervised MLLM methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of the retrieval paradigm.
arXiv:2606. 17950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains.
The paper introduces Redemption Score (RS), a multi‑modal evaluation framework for image captioning that combines three complementary signals: Mutual Information Divergence for global image‑text alignment, DINO‑based perceptual similarity of cycle‑generated images for visual grounding, and LLM text embeddings for contextual similarity to human references. RS fuses these signals to provide a more holistic assessment, achieving a Kendall‑τ of 58.42 on Flickr8k and outperforming most prior methods. The framework demonstrates consistent performance across Conceptual Captions and MS COCO, offering a robust evaluation that captures both visual accuracy and text quality.
arXiv:2606. 24716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence.
arXiv:2607. 16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image descriptions represented with language models (LMs) predict human brain responses to naturalistic images in high-level visual regions, but the factors driving this predictivity remain unclear.
UMER is a Unified Multimodal Embedding and Ranking framework that combines contrastive embeddings with Pair‑Aware Discriminative Reasoning to improve universal multimodal retrieval. It replaces item‑wise reflection with pair‑wise comparison of query–candidate pairs, enabling explicit identification of matching and discrepancy evidence. A mutual distillation strategy transfers reliable pairwise preferences between the embedding and ranking components, and UMER achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the MMEB‑V2 benchmark while supporting budget‑adjustable inference.
arXiv:2602. 07026v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the success of multimodal contrastive learning in aligning visual and linguistic representations, a persistent geometric anomaly, the Modality Gap, remains: embeddings of distinct modalities expressing identical semantics occupy systematically offset regions.