用冻结的多模态大模型生成细粒度语义梯度,提升图像检索精度。
Beyond Scalar Distances: Semantic Attribute Gradients from Frozen MLLMs for Visual Embeddings

- 通过多模态大模型识别图像间具体差异属性,生成非均匀监督信号。
- 在多个数据集上零样本检索召回率提升3至6个百分点。
- 无需修改主模型,训练后丢弃大模型,部署成本与基线一致。
图像检索中的视觉编码器通常采用类别标签监督,每对样本仅提供一个标量信号,统一拉远或拉近嵌入向量,忽略具体视觉属性差异。我们提出SAGA框架,将冻结的多模态大语言模型(MLLM)对图像对的属性判别能力转化为编码器的训练信号。具体地,使用组相对策略优化(GRPO)奖励MLLM对编码器输出标记的正确预测;由于正确预测需依赖标记暴露真实差异属性,反向梯度促使编码器显式编码这些属性,从而以属性级信号替代传统标量信号。辅以注意力蒸馏损失约束编码器嵌入对齐于MLLM关注的标记,并结合标准度量学习损失构建近邻检索几何结构。整个过程冻结MLLM并在推理时移除,保持与度量学习基线相当的部署开销。SAGA在CUB-200-2011、Cars-196、FGVC-Aircraft和iNaturalist Aves上实现零样本图像检索的Recall@1提升3到6点,超越现有最优方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched. A multimodal large language model (MLLM), shown the same pair, can articulate those attributes and use them to predict whether the images share a class. We propose \textbf{SAGA}, a framework that turns this language-grounded, attribute-aware perception into a training signal for the encoder itself. Specifically, we use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to reward the MLLM for correct predictions on the vision encoder's tokens. Since correct predictions require those tokens to expose the specific attributes that differ or match between the pair, the gradient pushes the encoder to encode them, replacing the uniform pair-level scalar with attribute-resolved supervision. An auxiliary attention-distillation loss anchors the encoder's embedding to tokens the MLLM attended to, and a standard metric-learning loss shapes the embedding geometry for nearest-neighbour retrieval. The MLLM is frozen throughout and discarded at inference, matching the deployment cost of a metric-learning baseline. SAGA improves Recall@1 by 3 to 6 points over state-of-the-art baselines on CUB-200-2011, Cars-196, FGVC-Aircraft, and iNaturalist Aves on zero-shot image retrieval.
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