arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

MLLMCLIP: Feature-Level Distillation of MLLM for Robust Vision-Language Representations

MLLMCLIP introduces a heterogeneous distillation framework that transfers multimodal knowledge from a generative Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) teacher directly into a discriminative CLIP student, eliminating the need for synthetic hard negatives. The method uses an attention-based per-layer token selection and a CKA-based distillation loss to bridge architectural differences between the two models. As a result, MLLMCLIP achieves state‑of‑the‑art compositional accuracy and improves zero‑shot classification and image‑text retrieval performance.

By Jongsuk Kim, Qiyu Wu, Zhuoyuan Mao, Hiromi Wakaki, Junmo Kim, Yuki Mitsufuji