Flow-CLIP: Image-Conditioned Residual Scoring for CompositionalImage-Text Matching
Abstract: Vision--language pre-training has enabled substantial progress in image--text retrieval and zero-shot recognition by learning transferable cross-modal representations. However, sentence-level alignment remains insufficient for compositional matching, where captions can describe the same objects and attributes while differing in how these elements are bound. To address this limitation, we propose Flow-CLIP, which refines global image-text alignment through image-conditioned changes in token--patch evidence. Global Compatibility Calibration (GCC) learns a sentence-level similarity metric, while Image-Conditioned Evidence Refinement (ICER) incorporates visual patch context into token queries and uses the resulting change in local matching evidence to adjust the global score. We further introduce Cross-Image Margin Ranking (CIMR), which compares the same positive--negative caption pair across matched and mismatched images, encouraging a larger ranking margin when the image supports the correct description. Experiments on compositional matching and attribute--object binding benchmarks show that Flow-CLIP improves binding accuracy over pretrained CLIP and learned global alignment through local evidence refinement, while cross-image ranking supervision mitigates reliance on language priors. Code will be released at link.