# Learning Visual Representation from Modality-Shared Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12661 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12661/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [EuroSAT: A Novel Dataset and Deep Learning Benchmark for Land Use and Land Cover Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00029/) (2017)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00121/) (2017)
- [SimVLM: Simple Visual Language Model Pretraining with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10904/) (2021)
- [FILIP: Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07783/) (2021)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [LiT: Zero-Shot Transfer with Locked-image text Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07991/) (2021)
- [Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training for Image Captioning and VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11059/) (2019)
- [The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04790/) (2020)
- [SLIP: Self-supervision meets Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12750/) (2021)
- [VATT: Transformers for Multimodal Self-Supervised Learning from Raw Video, Audio and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11178/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [SuS-X: Training-Free Name-Only Transfer of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16198/) (2022)
- [Learning Customized Visual Models with Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07094/) (2023)
- [CLIPPO: Image-and-Language Understanding from Pixels Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08045/) (2022)
- [IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14985/) (2023)
- [A Sentence Speaks a Thousand Images: Domain Generalization through Distilling CLIP with Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12530/) (2023)
- [GeoLM: Empowering Language Models for Geospatially Grounded Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14478/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Multimodal Representation in Contrastive Learning: From Patch and Token Embeddings to Finite Discrete Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14865/) (2023)
- [Unify, Align and Refine: Multi-Level Semantic Alignment for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15932/) (2023)
- [Mitigate the Gap: Investigating Approaches for Improving Cross-Modal Alignment in CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17639/) (2024)
- [VoLTA: Vision-Language Transformer with Weakly-Supervised Local-Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04135/) (2022)
- [NLIP: Noise-robust Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07086/) (2022)
- [Improved baselines for vision-language pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08675/) (2023)
- [Unified Pre-training with Pseudo Texts for Text-To-Image Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01420/) (2023)
- [Post-pre-training for Modality Alignment in Vision-Language Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12717/) (2025)
- [RAP: Efficient Text-Video Retrieval with Sparse-and-Correlated Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19465/) (2024)
- [Siamese Vision Transformers are Scalable Audio-visual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19638/) (2024)
- [CoBIT: A Contrastive Bi-directional Image-Text Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13455/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Perception for Unified Visual Multi-modal Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06583/) (2025)
- [RILS: Masked Visual Reconstruction in Language Semantic Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06958/) (2023)
- [Leveraging per Image-Token Consistency for Vision-Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15398/) (2022)
- [Prompt-Driven Contrastive Learning for Transferable Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20657/) (2024)
- [FFF: Fixing Flawed Foundations in contrastive pre-training results in very strong Vision-Language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10286/) (2024)
- [Semantic Residual for Multimodal Unified Discrete Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19128/) (2024)
- [On Robustness in Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04385/) (2023)
- [GrowCLIP: Data-aware Automatic Model Growing for Large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11331/) (2023)
- [Augment, Drop & Swap: Improving Diversity in LLM Captions for Efficient Music-Text Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11498/) (2024)
- [Choosing Wisely and Learning Deeply: Selective Cross-Modality Distillation via CLIP for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15145/) (2023)
- [Continual Cross-Modal Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00561/) (2025)
- [SemAlign: Language Guided Semi-supervised Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11724/) (2026)
- [Asymmetric Hierarchical Anchoring for Robust Audio-Visual Cross-Modal Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03570/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale multi-modal contrastive pre-training has demonstrated great utility to learn transferable features for a range of downstream tasks by mapping multiple modalities into a shared embedding space. Typically, this has employed separate encoders for each modality. However, recent work suggests that transformers can support learning across multiple modalities and allow knowledge sharing. Inspired by this, we investigate a variety of Modality-Shared Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (MS-CLIP) frameworks. More specifically, we question how many parameters of a transformer model can be shared across modalities during contrastive pre-training, and rigorously examine architectural design choices that position the proportion of parameters shared along a spectrum. In studied conditions, we observe that a mostly unified encoder for vision and language signals outperforms all other variations that separate more parameters. Additionally, we find that light-weight modality-specific parallel modules further improve performance. Experimental results show that the proposed MS-CLIP approach outperforms vanilla CLIP by up to 13% relative in zero-shot ImageNet classification (pre-trained on YFCC-100M), while simultaneously supporting a reduction of parameters. In addition, our approach outperforms vanilla CLIP by 1.6 points in linear probing on a collection of 24 downstream vision tasks. Furthermore, we discover that sharing parameters leads to semantic concepts from different modalities being encoded more closely in the embedding space, facilitating the transferring of common semantic structure (e.g., attention patterns) from language to vision. Code is available at hrefhttps://github.com/Hxyou/MSCLIPURL.