READ-CLIP (ViT-B/32)

READ-CLIP is a CLIP model fine-tuned with READ (REconstruction and Alignment of text Descriptions), a lightweight recipe that strengthens the compositional reasoning of vision–language models. This is the official checkpoint for the NeurIPS 2025 paper "Enhancing Compositional Reasoning in CLIP via Reconstruction and Alignment of Text Descriptions."

• 📄 Paper: arXiv:2510.16540 (NeurIPS 2025)
• 💻 Code: github.com/JiH00nKw0n/READ-CLIP
• 🧩 Base model: openai/clip-vit-base-patch32
• 🌐 Project page: jih00nkw0n.github.io/READ-CLIP

Method

Contrastively trained CLIP models tend to behave like a bag of words, attending to individual tokens rather than the relationships between them. READ adds two auxiliary objectives on top of the standard contrastive loss during fine-tuning:

• Token-level reconstruction — a frozen T5 decoder (google/t5-v1_1-large) reconstructs related captions from the CLIP text embedding, forcing the embedding to retain word-relationship information.
• Sentence-level alignment — paraphrases of the same caption are pulled together in the embedding space, making representations robust to surface wording.

Both objectives are training-only. At inference, READ-CLIP is a drop-in CLIPModel: no decoder, no extra parameters, and the same compute as the original CLIP.

Usage

The checkpoint loads directly with transformers as a standard CLIPModel:

import torch
from transformers import CLIPModel, CLIPProcessor

device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"

model = CLIPModel.from_pretrained("Mayfull/READ-CLIP").to(device)
processor = CLIPProcessor.from_pretrained("openai/clip-vit-base-patch32")

inputs = processor(
    text=["a photo of a cat", "a photo of a dog"],
    images=image,                 # a PIL.Image
    return_tensors="pt",
    padding=True,
).to(device)

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)

probs = outputs.logits_per_image.softmax(dim=-1)

Results

Compositional reasoning accuracy on five standard benchmarks (ViT-B/32 backbone):

Benchmark	READ-CLIP	NegCLIP	FSC-CLIP
WhatsUp	43.9	42.4	39.8
VALSE	76.2	73.7	74.4
CREPE	41.5	30.5	42.5
SugarCrepe	87.0	83.6	85.2
SugarCrepe++ (ITT)	69.8	65.0	67.9
SugarCrepe++ (TOT)	66.2	62.5	64.4
Average	64.1	59.6	62.4

See the paper for the full set of baselines and ablations.

Training

• Backbone: openai/clip-vit-base-patch32 (ViT-B/32)
• Data: MS-COCO (Karpathy training split, ~113K image–caption pairs)
• Schedule: 5 epochs, global batch size 256, AdamW, lr 1e-5 (cosine), weight decay 0.1, bf16
• Hardware: 1× NVIDIA A100 (~2 GPU-hours), seed 2025

Citation

@inproceedings{kwon2026enhancing,
  title={Enhancing Compositional Reasoning in {CLIP} via Reconstruction and Alignment of Text Descriptions},
  author={Jihoon Kwon and Kyle Min and Jy-yong Sohn},
  booktitle={The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year={2026},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=6uKIm4bfEe}
}

License

Released under the MIT License.