arXiv AI

Back into Plato's Cave: Examining Cross-modal Representational Convergence at Scale

arXiv:2604. 18572v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that neural networks trained on different modalities (e.

arXiv AI
Jun 8

Modality Gap-Driven Subspace Alignment Training Paradigm For Multimodal Large Language Models

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.

By Xiaomin Yu, Yi Xin, Yuhui Zhang, Wenjie Zhang, Chonghan Liu, Hanzhen Zhao, Chen Liu, Xiaoxing Hu, Ziyue Qiao, Hao Tang, Xiaobin Hu, Chengwei Qin, Hui Xiong, Yu Qiao, Shuicheng Yan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

The Alignment Illusion in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper investigates whether layer-wise visual‑text similarity in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) truly reflects content‑level cross‑modal interaction. By injecting Gaussian noise into the visual stream of 13 MLLMs, the authors show that task accuracy drops sharply while traditional scalar alignment metrics (CKA, SVCCA, MIR, principal‑angle cosine) fail to distinguish corrupted from clean inputs, a phenomenon they term the alignment illusion. They propose the principal‑angle gap (PA gap) as a more reliable geometric diagnostic that correlates better with task performance and reveals when internal geometry diverges from accuracy.

By Hong-Han Wang, Yuntao Wang, Hu Ding
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

The Alignment Illusion in Multimodal Large Language Models

The paper investigates whether layer-wise visual‑text similarity in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) truly reflects cross‑modal content integration. By injecting Gaussian noise into the visual stream of 13 MLLMs, the authors show that common scalar alignment metrics (CKA, SVCCA, MIR, principal‑angle cosine) fail to distinguish corrupted from intact visual tokens, a phenomenon they term the "alignment illusion." They propose the principal‑angle gap (PA gap) as a more reliable geometric diagnostic that correlates better with task accuracy and reveals when internal geometry diverges from performance.

arXiv AI
Jun 24

Mind the Heads: Topological Representation Alignment for Multimodal LLMs

arXiv:2606. 23885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Representation alignment has emerged as an effective approach to improve Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by regularizing their internal representations toward those of an external vision encoder.

By Davide Caffagni, Alberto Compagnoni, Federico Melis, Sara Sarto, Pier Luigi Dovesi, Mark Granroth-Wilding, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

What Converges in the Platonic Representation Hypothesis? Structure over Geometry

The paper investigates the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, which posits that more capable models converge toward shared representations. By distinguishing relational structure (which samples are related) from metric geometry (quantitative relations like distances), the authors develop a controlled $2 imes2$ framework to evaluate both aspects at local and global scales. Their findings show that relational structure consistently converges across vision‑language and video‑text models, while metric geometry converges much more weakly, a pattern that persists even when using a Riemannian metric approximation.

By Junwon You, Mihyun Jang, Sangwoo Mo, Jae-Hun Jung
arXiv AI
Jun 24

When Language Overwrites Vision: Over-Alignment and Geometric Debiasing in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2605. 08245v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly power high-stakes applications, from medical imaging to autonomous systems, yet they routinely hallucinate, confidently describing content not present in the input.

By Harshvardhan Saini, Samyak Jha, Yiming Tang, Dianbo Liu