# ComAlign: Compositional Alignment in Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08206 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08206/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 30 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2024.

## Placed in

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

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

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [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)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [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)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [FILIP: Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07783/) (2021)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03162/) (2022)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [Supervision Exists Everywhere: A Data Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05208/) (2021)
- [Multi-Grained Vision Language Pre-Training: Aligning Texts with Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08276/) (2021)
- [UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15409/) (2020)
- [CREPE: Can Vision-Language Foundation Models Reason Compositionally?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07796/) (2022)
- [Similarity Reasoning and Filtration for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01368/) (2021)
- [Vision-Language Pre-training: Basics, Recent Advances, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09263/) (2022)
- [Probing Image-Language Transformers for Verb Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09141/) (2021)
- [PyramidCLIP: Hierarchical Feature Alignment for Vision-language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14095/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Pretraining Unmasked: A Meta-Analysis and a Unified Framework of Vision-and-Language BERTs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15124/) (2020)
- [Focus Your Attention: A Bidirectional Focal Attention Network for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11416/) (2019)
- [PEVL: Position-enhanced Pre-training and Prompt Tuning for Vision-language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11169/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [FIX-CLIP: Dual-Branch Hierarchical Contrastive Learning via Synthetic Captions for Better Understanding of Long Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10095/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have showcased a remarkable ability to extract transferable features for downstream tasks. Nonetheless, the training process of these models is usually based on a coarse-grained contrastive loss between the global embedding of images and texts which may lose the compositional structure of these modalities. Many recent studies have shown VLMs lack compositional understandings like attribute binding and identifying object relationships. Although some recent methods have tried to achieve finer-level alignments, they either are not based on extracting meaningful components of proper granularity or don't properly utilize the modalities' correspondence (especially in image-text pairs with more ingredients). Addressing these limitations, we introduce Compositional Alignment (ComAlign), a fine-grained approach to discover more exact correspondence of text and image components using only the weak supervision in the form of image-text pairs. Our methodology emphasizes that the compositional structure (including entities and relations) extracted from the text modality must also be retained in the image modality. To enforce correspondence of fine-grained concepts in image and text modalities, we train a lightweight network lying on top of existing visual and language encoders using a small dataset. The network is trained to align nodes and edges of the structure across the modalities. Experimental results on various VLMs and datasets demonstrate significant improvements in retrieval and compositional benchmarks, affirming the effectiveness of our plugin model.