A Causal Marriage between VLM and IRM from Understanding to Reasoning

Ziliang Chen, Tianang Xiao, Jusheng Zhang, Yongsen Zheng, Yang Liu, Zhao-rong Lai, Liang Lin; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 4749-4760

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP exhibit extraordinary out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, while the theoretical foundations underlying this robustness remain largely unexplored. This work establishes a connection between CLIP and Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM), the principled paradigm to overcome OOD problems, through token-level causal representation learning. Our key insight is that CLIP's contrastive objective, when optimally trained, recovers modality-invariant causal factors at the word-and-phrase granularity. By decomposing text prompts into class-specific tokens (causal factors) and class-agnostic context tokens (environmental factors), we prove that a vocabulary-constrained InfoNCE objective becomes formally equivalent to IRM's invariance criterion. Grounded in this equivalence, we propose a mid-training paradigm aiming to inject invariant learning signals into pre-trained CLIP without architectural modification, yielding CLIP-IRM with superior OOD performance. We further extend this causal alignment to multimodal reasoning via using CLIP-IRM's invariant alignment scores as process-level rewards in reinforcement learning, effectively transplanting IRM's guarantees to robust sequential decision-making in Multimodal Large Language Models. Extensive experiments validate our theoretical framework and present substantial improvements in both multimodal OOD understanding and reasoning tasks.