Preprint
A Gap to a Reference Is Not a Loss: What Text-Capability Comparisons Between Vision-Language Models and Their Language Backbones Measure, Why Independent Audits and Vendor Reports Disagree in Sign, and the Controlled Trajectory That Would Assign the Cause
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Life of Research A vision-language model is usually built by attaching an image encoder to a pretrained language model and training the combination on multimodal data, and a recurring claim is that this damages the language model's own text…