# Closing the Modality Gap Aligns Group-Wise Semantics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18525 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18525/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [EVA-CLIP: Improved Training Techniques for CLIP at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15389/) (2023)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02053/) (2022)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [BEATs: Audio Pre-Training with Acoustic Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09058/) (2022)
- [LanguageBind: Extending Video-Language Pretraining to N-modality by Language-based Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01852/) (2023)
- [VAST: A Vision-Audio-Subtitle-Text Omni-Modality Foundation Model and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18500/) (2023)
- [AudioMNIST: Exploring Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Audio Analysis on a Simple Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03418/) (2018)
- [VideoCoCa: Video-Text Modeling with Zero-Shot Transfer from Contrastive Captioners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04979/) (2022)
- [Diagnosing and Rectifying Vision Models using Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04269/) (2023)
- [Two Effects, One Trigger: On the Modality Gap, Object Bias, and Information Imbalance in Contrastive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07983/) (2024)
- [Gramian Multimodal Representation Learning and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11959/) (2024)
- [What to align in multimodal contrastive learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07402/) (2024)
- [Temperature Schedules for Self-Supervised Contrastive Methods on Long-Tail Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13664/) (2023)
- [Cross the Gap: Exposing the Intra-modal Misalignment in CLIP via Modality Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04263/) (2025)
- [It's Not a Modality Gap: Characterizing and Addressing the Contrastive Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18570/) (2024)
- [Explaining and Mitigating the Modality Gap in Contrastive Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07909/) (2024)
- [Contrasting with Symile: Simple Model-Agnostic Representation Learning for Unlimited Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01053/) (2024)
- [Mitigate the Gap: Investigating Approaches for Improving Cross-Modal Alignment in CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17639/) (2024)
- [Understanding Contrastive Learning via Distributionally Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11048/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Out of Sight, Still in Mind: Token Compression for Omni-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21179/) (2026)
- [The Geometry of Compromise: Unlocking Generative Capabilities via Controllable Modality Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00279/) (2026)
- [Same Concept, Different Directions: Cross-Modal Feature Heterogeneity in Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29888/) (2026)
- [LAYERSCOPE: A Layerwise Characterization of Video and Multimodal Learned Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28086/) (2026)
- [Omni-Modal LLMs Know More Than They Say](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16135/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In multimodal learning, CLIP has been recognized as the textitde facto method for learning a shared latent space across multiple modalities, placing similar representations close to each other and moving them away from dissimilar ones. Although CLIP-based losses effectively align modalities at the semantic level, the resulting latent spaces often remain only partially shared, revealing a structural mismatch known as the modality gap. While the necessity of addressing this phenomenon remains debated, particularly given its limited impact on instance-wise tasks (e.g., retrieval), we prove that its influence is instead strongly pronounced in group-level tasks (e.g., clustering). To support this claim, we introduce a novel method designed to consistently reduce this discrepancy in two-modal settings, with a straightforward extension to the general n-modal case. Through our extensive evaluation, we demonstrate our novel insight: while reducing the gap provides only marginal or inconsistent improvements in traditional instance-wise tasks, it significantly enhances group-wise tasks. These findings may reshape our understanding of the modality gap, highlighting its key role in improving performance on tasks requiring semantic grouping.