Yichao Cai

Multimodal representation learning, exemplified by multimodal contrastive learning (MMCL) using image-text pairs, aims to learn powerful representations by aligning cues across modalities. This approach relies on the core assumption that the exemplar image-text pairs constitute two representations of an identical concept. However, recent research has revealed that real-world datasets often exhibit misalignment. There are two distinct viewpoints on how to address this issue: one suggests mitigating the misalignment, and the other leveraging it. We seek here to reconcile these seemingly opposing perspectives, and to provide a practical guide for practitioners. Using latent variable models we thus formalize misalignment by introducing two specific mechanisms: selection bias, where some semantic variables are missing, and perturbation bias, where semantic variables are distorted – both affecting latent variables shared across modalities. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that, under mild assumptions, the representations learned by MMCL capture exactly the information related to the subset of the semantic variables invariant to selection and perturbation biases. This provides a unified perspective for understanding misalignment. Based on this, we further offer actionable insights into how misalignment should inform the design of real-world ML systems. We validate our theoretical findings through extensive empirical studies on both synthetic data and real image-text datasets, shedding light on the nuanced impact of misalignment on multimodal representation learning.

Contrastive vision-language models, such as CLIP, have garnered considerable attention for various dowmsteam tasks, mainly due to the remarkable ability of the learned features for generalization. However, the features they learned often blend content and style information, which somewhat limits their generalization capabilities under distribution shifts. To address this limitation, we adopt a causal generative perspective for multimodal data and propose contrastive learning with data augmentation to disentangle content features from the original representations. To achieve this, we begins with exploring image augmentation techniques and develop a method to seamlessly integrate them into pre-trained CLIP-like models to extract pure content features. Taking a step further, recognizing the inherent semantic richness and logical structure of text data, we explore the use of text augmentation to isolate latent content from style features. This enables CLIP-like model’s encoders to concentrate on latent content information, refining the learned representations by pre-trained CLIP-like models. Our extensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate significant improvements in zero-shot and few-shot classification tasks, alongside enhanced robustness to various perturbations. These results underscore the effectiveness of our proposed methods in refining vision-language representations and advancing the state-of-the-art in multimodal learning.