By swapping the retrieval backbone in the CIR-EVL pipeline with OpenCLIP LAION-2B pretrained models of increasing size, the paper observes a clear log-linear relationship between model capacity and performance on both CIRCO and CIRR. On CIRCO, map@5 rises from 14.94 (ViT-B/32) to 18.57 (ViT-L/14) to 26.77 (ViT-G/14); on CIRR, r@1 rises from 23.94 to 24.55 to 34.65. The authors note this contrasts with prior work (vaze et al. 2023) that found only minimal gains from scaling.
Scaling study uses OpenCLIP LAION-2B pretrained weights, which may differ from the original OpenAI CLIP training recipe; the log-linear trend is observed over a limited range of three to four model sizes.