# GOAL: Global-local Object Alignment Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17782 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17782/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 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 38 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2025.

## 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 38)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09683/) (2023)
- [Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15378/) (2024)
- [GLIPv2: Unifying Localization and Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05836/) (2022)
- [Re-ranking Person Re-identification with k-reciprocal Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08398/) (2017)
- [Composing Text and Image for Image Retrieval - An Empirical Odyssey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07119/) (2018)
- [MaskCLIP: Masked Self-Distillation Advances Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12262/) (2022)
- [VITA: Towards Open-Source Interactive Omni Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05211/) (2024)
- [Person Re-identification in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02531/) (2016)
- [Freeze-Omni: A Smart and Low Latency Speech-to-speech Dialogue Model with Frozen LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00774/) (2024)
- [DOCCI: Descriptions of Connected and Contrasting Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19753/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Vision-Language Models as Differentiable Semantic and Spatial Rewards for Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15772/) (2025)
- [Interpretable Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning with Rectified Target-Domain Local Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17655/) (2026)
- [Spotlighter: Revisiting Prompt Tuning from a Representative Mining View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00905/) (2025)
- [LLM-Driven Completeness and Consistency Evaluation for Cultural Heritage Data Augmentation in Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06268/) (2025)
- [FarSLIP: Discovering Effective CLIP Adaptation for Fine-Grained Remote Sensing Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14901/) (2025)
- [PowerCLIP: Powerset Alignment for Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23170/) (2025)
- [MulCLIP: A Multi-level Alignment Framework for Enhancing Fine-grained Long-context CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07128/) (2025)
- [Aligning Forest and Trees in Images & Long Captions for Visually Grounded Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02977/) (2026)
- [TrajPred: Trajectory-Conditioned Joint Embedding Prediction for Surgical Instrument-Tissue Interaction Recognition in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06999/) (2026)
- [Pixel-level Scene Understanding in One Token: Visual States Need What-is-Where Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13904/) (2026)
- [Group-DINOmics: Incorporating People Dynamics into DINO for Self-supervised Group Activity Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04467/) (2026)
- [Fast-then-Fine: A Two-Stage Framework with Multi-Granular Representation for Cross-Modal Retrieval in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20429/) (2026)
- [FAST-GOAL: Fast and Efficient Global-local Object Alignment Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26615/) (2026)
- [SigLIP-HD by Fine-to-Coarse Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09488/) (2026)
- [Latent-Action-Guided Video-Language Feature Learning for Surgical Instrument-Tissue Interaction Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19889/) (2026)
- [Grad-CAM for Vision Transformers: A Systematic Taxonomy and Audit of Methodological Ambiguity in Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05258/) (2026)
- [Which Negatives Matter? Ask Your Text Encoder: Adaptive Similarity Margins for Dense-Caption Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18521/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.