arXiv Machine Learning

Topology-Aware Representation Alignment for Semi-Supervised Vision-Language Learning

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 Computer Vision
Oct 26

Separating Angular Alignment from Radial Ordering in Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces AURORA, a hyperbolic vision‑language framework that separates angular alignment from radial ordering. Angular alignment captures semantic similarity while a novel Radial‑Angular Order Cone (RAOC) models hierarchical entailment based on parent‑child radial gaps. The approach includes norm regularization to prevent radial degeneration and is evaluated on large image‑text datasets, outperforming both Euclidean and hyperbolic baselines in zero‑shot classification, retrieval, hierarchical reasoning, and compositional understanding.

By Mingyang Gao, Yuwei Wu, Shiyu Luo, Wei Wu, Xiaomeng Fan, Qihao Lv, Haoyu Zhang, Rui Gao, Bingzhen Liu, Zhi Gao, Che Sun
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 23

RankAlign: Vision-Language Representation Alignment via Rank Transformation

RankAlign introduces a rank-based normalization technique for aligning vision and language representations without cross-modal supervision. By converting within-modality similarity kernels into ordinal relational representations, it preserves the relative ordering of similarities while remaining invariant to strictly increasing reparameterizations. The method offers theoretical guarantees for exact and partial ordinal agreement and shows improved, more stable class-level correspondence recovery across various frozen encoders and datasets, even under label corruption and domain shift.

By Enzhe Zhao, Marco Fiorucci, Lamberto Ballan
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 Computer Vision
Sep 1

TopoAgent: A Structure-Aware Perception-to-Reasoning Framework for Diagram-to-Graph Topology Extraction with Large Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces TopoBench-180, a human‑verified benchmark of 180 structural diagrams with canonical graph annotations, and TopoAgent, a perception‑to‑reasoning framework that extracts graph topology from diagrams using large vision‑language models. TopoAgent combines grounded perception, global structural priors, node inventory construction, local‑to‑global relation reasoning, and consistency enforcement to progressively build the target graph. Experiments demonstrate that TopoAgent surpasses strong baselines, particularly in edge extraction, thereby advancing multimodal structured understanding for diagram‑to‑graph tasks.

By Bangwei Guo, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Shengyu Chen, Dongyue Li, Masaharu Morimoto, Takayuki Kuroda, Dimitris Metaxas, Haifeng Chen
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
Aug 11

Explaining, Verifying, and Aligning Semantic Hierarchies in Vision-Language Model Embeddings

arXiv:2603. 26798v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language model (VLM) encoders such as CLIP enable strong retrieval and zero-shot classification in a shared image-text embedding space, yet the semantic organization of this space is rarely inspected.

By Gesina Schwalbe, Mert Keser, Moritz Bayerkuhnlein, Edgar Heinert, Annika M\"utze, Marvin Keller, Sparsh Tiwari, Georgii Mikriukov, Diedrich Wolter, Jae Hee Lee, Matthias Rottmann