On the Spectral Geometry of Cross-Modal Representations: A Functional Map Diagnostic for Multimodal Alignment

arXiv:2604.08579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study cross-modal alignment between independently pretrained vision (DINOv2) and language (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) encoders using the functional map framework from computational geometry, which represents correspondence between representation manifolds as a compact linear operator between graph Laplacian eigenbases. While the framework underperforms Procrustes alignment and relative representations for cross-modal retrieval across all supervision bu