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
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
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:2506. 08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways.
By Fan Xu, Luis A. Leiva
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:2308. 06035v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words.
By Viktor Kewenig, Andrew Lampinen, Samuel A. Nastase, Christopher Edwards, Quitterie Lacome D'Elascombe, Akilles Rechardt, Jeremy I Skipper, Gabriella Vigliocco