Decipher the Modality Gap in Multimodal Contrastive Learning: From Convergent Representations to Pairwise Alignment

Multimodal contrastive learning (MCL) aims to embed data from different modalities in a shared embedding space. However, empirical evidence shows that representations from different modalities occupy completely separate regions of embedding space, a phenomenon referred to as the modality gap. Moreover, experimental findings on how the size of the modality gap influences downstream performance are inconsistent. These observations raise two key questions: (1) What causes the modality gap? (2) How does it affect downstream tasks? To address these questions, this paper introduces the first theoretical framework for analyzing the convergent optimal representations of MCL and the modality alignment when training is optimized. Specifically, we prove that without any constraint or under the cone constraint, the modality gap converges to zero. Under the subspace constraint (i.e., representations of two modalities fall into two distinct hyperplanes due to dimension collapse), the modality gap converges to the smallest angle between the two hyperplanes. This result identifies dimension collapse as the fundamental origin of the modality gap. Furthermore, our theorems demonstrate that paired samples cannot be perfectly aligned under the subspace constraint. The modality gap influences downstream performance by affecting the alignment between sample pairs. We prove that, in this case, perfect alignment between two modalities can still be achieved via two ways: hyperplane rotation and shared space projection.