# SILC: Improving Vision Language Pretraining with Self-Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13355 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13355/

## Key facts

- Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 68 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/prompt-learning-and-adaptation-of-clip/)
- Knowledge distillation / [Multimodal distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/multimodal-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [ProxyCLIP: Proxy Attention Improves CLIP for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04883/) (2024)
- [BRAVE: Broadening the visual encoding of vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07204/) (2024)
- [VidHalluc: Evaluating Temporal Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03735/) (2024)
- [Scaling Language-Free Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01017/) (2025)
- [Talking to DINO: Bridging Self-Supervised Vision Backbones with Language for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19331/) (2024)
- [SemiVL: Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Vision-Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16241/) (2023)
- [Learning to Prompt with Text Only Supervision for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02418/) (2024)
- [TIPS: Text-Image Pretraining with Spatial awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16512/) (2024)
- [Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12957/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Localized Language-Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02746/) (2024)
- [DeCLIP: Decoupled Learning for Open-Vocabulary Dense Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04410/) (2025)
- [Search3D: Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18431/) (2024)
- [Mosaic3D: Foundation Dataset and Model for Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02548/) (2025)
- [Comprehensive language-image pre-training for 3D medical image understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15042/) (2025)
- [Mask-Adapter: The Devil is in the Masks for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04533/) (2024)
- [Active Data Curation Effectively Distills Large-Scale Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18674/) (2024)
- [Multiplayer Interactive World Models with Representation Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05352/) (2026)
- [Improving Medical Multi-modal Contrastive Learning with Expert Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10153/) (2024)
- [How to Benchmark Vision Foundation Models for Semantic Segmentation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12172/) (2024)
- [Spot-Compose: A Framework for Open-Vocabulary Object Retrieval and Drawer Manipulation in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12440/) (2024)
- [COSMOS: Cross-Modality Self-Distillation for Vision Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01814/) (2024)
- [Refining CLIP's Spatial Awareness: A Visual-Centric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02328/) (2025)
- [Pushing the Frontier of Audiovisual Perception with Large-Scale Multimodal Correspondence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19687/) (2025)
- [TIPSv2: Advancing Vision-Language Pretraining with Enhanced Patch-Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12012/) (2026)
- [Generalized Decoupled Learning for Enhancing Open-Vocabulary Dense Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11256/) (2025)
- [Efficient Universal Perception Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22387/) (2026)
- [Unbiased Region-Language Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06244/) (2024)
- [EMMA: Efficient Visual Alignment in Multi-Modal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02080/) (2024)
- [The Spatial Blindspot of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09954/) (2026)
- [Multilingual Vision-Language Pre-training for the Remote Sensing Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23370/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image-Text pretraining on web-scale image caption datasets has become the default recipe for open vocabulary classification and retrieval models thanks to the success of CLIP and its variants. Several works have also used CLIP features for dense prediction tasks and have shown the emergence of open-set abilities. However, the contrastive objective used by these models only focuses on image-text alignment and does not incentivise image feature learning for dense prediction tasks. In this work, we introduce SILC, a novel framework for vision language pretraining. SILC improves image-text contrastive learning with the simple addition of local-to-global correspondence learning by self-distillation. We show that distilling local image features from an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher model significantly improves model performance on dense predictions tasks like detection and segmentation, while also providing improvements on image-level tasks such as classification and retrieval. SILC models sets a new state of the art for zero-shot classification, few shot classification, image and text retrieval, zero-shot segmentation, and open vocabulary segmentation. We further show that SILC features greatly benefit open vocabulary detection, captioning and visual question answering.