R. Manmatha

Yash Patel, Yusheng Xie, Yi Zhu et al. · amazon-science

Learning to segment images purely by relying on the image-text alignment from web data can lead to sub-optimal performance due to noise in the data. The noise comes from the samples where the associated text does not correlate with the image's visual content. Instead of purely relying on the alignment from the noisy data, this paper proposes a novel loss function termed SimCon, which accounts for intra-modal similarities to determine the appropriate set of positive samples to align. Further, using multiple views of the image (created synthetically) for training and combining the SimCon loss with it makes the training more robust. This version of the loss is termed MV-SimCon. The empirical results demonstrate that using the proposed loss function leads to consistent improvements on zero-shot, text supervised semantic segmentation and outperforms state-of-the-art by $+3.0\%$, $+3.3\%$ and $+6.9\%$ on PASCAL VOC, PASCAL Context and MSCOCO, respectively. With test time augmentations, we set a new record by improving these results further to $58.7\%$, $26.6\%$, and $33.3\%$ on PASCAL VOC, PASCAL Context, and MSCOCO, respectively. In addition, using the proposed loss function leads to robust training and faster convergence.

Ali Furkan Biten, Ron Litman, Yusheng Xie et al.

We propose a novel multimodal architecture for Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA), named Layout-Aware Transformer (LaTr). The task of STVQA requires models to reason over different modalities. Thus, we first investigate the impact of each modality, and reveal the importance of the language module, especially when enriched with layout information. Accounting for this, we propose a single objective pre-training scheme that requires only text and spatial cues. We show that applying this pre-training scheme on scanned documents has certain advantages over using natural images, despite the domain gap. Scanned documents are easy to procure, text-dense and have a variety of layouts, helping the model learn various spatial cues (e.g. left-of, below etc.) by tying together language and layout information. Compared to existing approaches, our method performs vocabulary-free decoding and, as shown, generalizes well beyond the training vocabulary. We further demonstrate that LaTr improves robustness towards OCR errors, a common reason for failure cases in STVQA. In addition, by leveraging a vision transformer, we eliminate the need for an external object detector. LaTr outperforms state-of-the-art STVQA methods on multiple datasets. In particular, +7.6% on TextVQA, +10.8% on ST-VQA and +4.0% on OCR-VQA (all absolute accuracy numbers).