I don't get this intuitively. So in the end, does this mean words are a kind of conceptualization of images? (Since images would come before language.) More than that, I'm curious whether this can improve the performance of vision-language models.
Text and image often represent same relationships: e.g. you can see squirrel near a tree in an image, and "squirrel" and "tree" are often mentioned together. So both image and text encoders would see concepts of "tree" and "squirrel" close in some sense.
Concepts emerge as good compressions of data, or repeated patterns, or recurring distinctions that prove useful to name and recognize.