The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
The paper investigates how the modality gap— the separation between image and text representations in contrastive vision‑language models—affects different downstream tasks. By showing that a single dominant direction accounts for most of the image‑text mean separation, the authors explain why reducing or removing this gap can improve zero‑shot classification, degrade retrieval, or restore performance depending on the task. The study provides a geometric framework that clarifies when and why gap interventions should be applied in vision‑language systems.
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.
arXiv:2610.33798v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An image is rarely described only once. Retrieval benchmarks and many collections attach several captions to each picture, yet dual encoders still ju...
arXiv:2609.23717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Global vision--language similarities compress an image and a caption into one vector, preserving semantics but not which word corresponds to which regi...
arXiv:2506. 08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Different machine learning models can represent the same underlying concept in different ways.
TokenSwap introduces a method to benchmark and reduce the modality gap in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by interleaving semantically aligned images with text tokens. By transforming text-only benchmarks like MMLU into image‑interleaved versions (TokenSwap‑Bench), the authors reveal a pervasive performance drop—averaging 19.6%—across 42 MLLMs, with reasoning models showing smaller gaps. Training with TokenSwap mitigates this gap while maintaining strong text‑only and vision‑language performance.