Hyungyu Choi

Hyungyu Choi, Young Kyun Jang, Chanho Eom

Vision-language models such as CLIP have shown impressive capabilities in aligning images and text, but they often struggle with lengthy and detailed text descriptions due to pre-training on short and concise captions. We present FAST-GOAL (Fast and Efficient Global-local Object Alignment Learning), an efficient fine-tuning method that enhances ability of CLIP to handle lengthy text through global-local semantic alignment. Our method consists of two key components. First, Fast Local Image-Sentence Matching (FLISM) efficiently extracts local image regions through object detection and spatial division, then matches them with corresponding sentences. Second, Token Similarity-based Learning (TSL) maximizes the similarity between patch tokens from specific regions in the image and their corresponding region embeddings, applying the same principle to text, which enhances the ability of the model to capture detailed correspondences. Additionally, we introduce GLIT100k, a dataset that provides both global image-lengthy caption pairs and context-derived local pairs, where local descriptions are extracted from global captions to maintain semantic coherence. Through extensive experiments on long caption datasets (DOCCI, DCI) and short caption datasets (MSCOCO, Flickr30k), we demonstrate that FAST-GOAL achieves significant improvements over baselines, enabling effective adaptation of CLIP to detailed textual descriptions while maintaining computational efficiency.

Hyungyu Choi, Young Kyun Jang, Chanho Eom

Vision-language models like CLIP have shown impressive capabilities in aligning images and text, but they often struggle with lengthy and detailed text descriptions because of their training focus on short and concise captions. We present GOAL (Global-local Object Alignment Learning), a novel fine-tuning method that enhances CLIP's ability to handle lengthy text by leveraging both global and local semantic alignments between image and lengthy text. Our approach consists of two key components: Local Image-Sentence Matching (LISM), which identifies corresponding pairs between image segments and descriptive sentences, and Token Similarity-based Learning (TSL), which efficiently propagates local element attention through these matched pairs. Evaluating GOAL on three new benchmarks for image-lengthy text retrieval, we demonstrate significant improvements over baseline CLIP fine-tuning, establishing a simple yet effective approach for adapting CLIP to detailed textual descriptions. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method's focus on local semantic alignment alongside global context leads to more nuanced and representative embeddings, particularly beneficial for tasks requiring fine-grained understanding of lengthy text descriptions.

Heeji Yoon, Jaewoo Jung, Junwan Kim et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) trained with visual instruction tuning have achieved strong performance across diverse tasks, yet they remain limited in vision-centric tasks such as object counting or spatial reasoning. We attribute this gap to the prevailing text-only supervision paradigm, which provides only indirect guidance for the visual pathway and often leads MLLMs to discard fine-grained visual details during training. In this paper, we present VIsual Representation ALignment (VIRAL), a simple yet effective regularization strategy that aligns the internal visual representations of MLLMs with those of pre-trained vision foundation models (VFMs). By explicitly enforcing this alignment, VIRAL enables the model not only to retain critical visual details from the input vision encoder but also to complement additional visual knowledge from VFMs, thereby enhancing its ability to reason over complex visual inputs. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across all tasks on widely adopted multimodal benchmarks. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to validate the key design choices underlying our framework. We believe this simple finding opens up an important direction for the effective integration of visual information in training MLLMs.