利用生成预训练隐含对齐,实现跨模态表示学习的高效升级。
Scaling Language-Centric Omnimodal Representation Learning
- 以语言为中心,利用生成预训练中的隐式跨模态对齐作为基础。
- 在多类骨干模型和基准上达到顶尖性能,验证框架有效性。
- 发现生成能力与表征能力存在正相关,适合追求高质量多模态嵌入的研究者。
近期基于多模态大语言模型(MLLM)并使用对比学习(CL)微调的方法展现出良好效果,但其优势背后的机制尚未深入探讨。本文认为,这类方法的核心优势源于生成预训练过程中隐含的跨模态对齐:语言解码器在共享表示空间中利用多模态信号生成单模态输出。通过分析各向异性与核相似性结构,我们实证确认了MLLM表示中存在潜在对齐,使对比学习仅需作为轻量级优化阶段。基于此,提出语言中心的全模态嵌入框架LCO-Emb。在多种骨干模型和基准上的广泛实验表明其有效性,实现跨模态的最先进性能。进一步发现生成-表征缩放律(GRSL),即对比精炼带来的表征能力随MLLM生成能力提升而增强。这表明提升生成能力是改善表征质量的有效范式。我们提供了理论解释,将生成质量与表征性能上限形式关联,并在低资源视觉-文档检索任务上验证,持续生成预训练可进一步释放模型嵌入潜力。代码、模型与资源见https://github.com/LCO-Embedding/LCO-Embedding。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent multimodal embedding approaches leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) fine-tuned with contrastive learning (CL) have shown promising results, yet the underlying reasons behind their superiority remain underexplored. This work argues that a crucial advantage of MLLM-based approaches stems from implicit cross-modal alignment achieved during generative pretraining, where the language decoder learns to exploit multimodal signals within a shared representation space for generating unimodal outputs. Through analysis of anisotropy and kernel similarity structure, we empirically confirm that latent alignment emerges within MLLM representations, allowing CL to serve as a lightweight refinement stage. Leveraging this insight, we propose a Language-Centric Omnimodal Embedding framework, termed LCO-Emb. Extensive experiments across diverse backbones and benchmarks demonstrate its effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance across modalities. Furthermore, we identify a Generation-Representation Scaling Law (GRSL), showing that the representational capabilities gained through contrastive refinement scales positively with the MLLM's generative capabilities. This suggests that improving generative abilities evolves as an effective paradigm for enhancing representation quality. We provide a theoretical explanation of GRSL, which formally links the MLLM's generative quality to the upper bound on its representation performance, and validate it on a challenging, low-resource visual-document retrieval task, showing that continual generative pretraining before CL can further enhance the potential of a model's embedding capabilities. Codes, models, and resources are available at https://github.com/LCO-Embedding/LCO-Embedding.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。