$\beta$-CLIP: Text-Conditioned Contrastive Learning for Multi-Granular Vision-Language Alignment

TL;DR

$eta$-CLIP introduces a hierarchical, text-conditioned contrastive learning framework that enhances fine-grained vision-language alignment by leveraging multi-granular supervision and a novel contrastive loss, significantly improving dense image-text retrieval performance.

Contribution

The paper proposes $eta$-CLIP, a novel multi-granular, text-conditioned contrastive learning approach with a hierarchical alignment mechanism and a new contrastive loss, improving fine-grained vision-language tasks.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art dense alignment on Urban1K and FG-OVD datasets.

Demonstrates that hierarchical supervision benefits both soft and hard contrastive losses.

Significantly improves zero-shot and fine-tuned image-text retrieval performance.

Abstract

CLIP achieves strong zero-shot image-text retrieval by aligning global vision and text representations, yet it falls behind on fine-grained tasks even when fine-tuned on long, detailed captions. In this work, we propose $\beta$-CLIP, a multi-granular text-conditioned contrastive learning framework designed to achieve hierarchical alignment between multiple textual granularities-from full captions to sentences and phrases-and their corresponding visual regions. For each level of granularity, $\beta$-CLIP utilizes cross-attention to dynamically pool image patches, producing contextualized visual embeddings. To address the semantic overlap inherent in this hierarchy, we introduce the $\beta$-Contextualized Contrastive Alignment Loss ($\beta$-CAL). This objective parameterizes the trade-off between strict query-specific matching and relaxed intra-image contextualization, supporting both soft Cross-Entropy and hard Binary Cross-Entropy formulations. We find that each loss interacts differently with hierarchical supervision: CE's softmax sharpens fine-grained discrimination, while BCE's sigmoid favors long-text retrieval while both benefit from hierarchy. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that $\beta$-CLIP significantly improves dense alignment: achieving 91.8% T2I 92.3% I2T at R@1 on Urban1K and 30.9% on FG-OVD (Hard), setting state-of-the-art among methods trained without hard negatives. $\beta$-CLIP establishes a robust, adaptive baseline for dense vision-language correspondence. The code and models are released at https://github.com/fzohra/B-CLIP.