Yu-Tong Xie

UOT-Gap: A Variational Principle for the Modality Gap in Vision-Language Models via Unbalanced Optimal Transport

Vision-language models such as CLIP embed images and text in a shared space, where modality-specific distributions often remain separated. Existing accounts connect this modality gap to initialization, contrastive dynamics, and information imbalance, while its distributional and pairwise contributions to retrieval rema...