CVF · CVPR 2026:cvf:c60639ec7eca8dbe81c33a2ceffa940a · 记录 #1

Is the Modality Gap a Bug or a Feature? A Robustness Perspective

来源日期（仅到年份） 2026

来源记录日期 2026

雷达观测 2026-11-01 22:42

摘要

Many modern multi-modal models (e.g. CLIP) seek an embedding space in which the two modalities are aligned. Somewhat surprisingly, almost all existing models show a strong modality gap: the distribution of images is well-separated from the distribution of texts in the shared embedding space. Despite a series of recent papers on this topic, it is still not clear why this gap exists nor whether closing the gap in post-processing will lead to better performance on downstream tasks. In this paper we show that under certain conditions, minimizing the contrastive loss will lead to a representation in which the two modalities are separated by a global gap vector that is orthogonal to the embeddings of both modalities. We also show that under these conditions the modality gap is monotonically related to robustness: decreasing the gap does not change the clean accuracy of the models but makes it less likely that a model will change its output when small, semantically inconsequential changes are made to the input. Our experiments show that for many real-world VLMs we can significantly increase robustness by a simple post-processing step that moves one modality towards the mean of the other modality, without any loss to clean accuracy.