UNIMO-2: End-to-End Unified Vision-Language Grounded Learning
This addresses scalability and performance issues in vision-language models for researchers and practitioners, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior unified-modal approaches.
The paper tackles the limitation of existing Vision-Language Pre-training methods that rely on aligned image-caption data and expensive regional features by proposing UNIMO-2, an end-to-end unified-modal framework for joint learning on aligned and unaligned data, resulting in improved performance on cross-modal tasks and impressive results on single-modal tasks.
Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has achieved impressive performance on various cross-modal downstream tasks. However, most existing methods can only learn from aligned image-caption data and rely heavily on expensive regional features, which greatly limits their scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end unified-modal pre-training framework, namely UNIMO-2, for joint learning on both aligned image-caption data and unaligned image-only and text-only corpus. We build a unified Transformer model to jointly learn visual representations, textual representations and semantic alignment between images and texts. In particular, we propose to conduct grounded learning on both images and texts via a sharing grounded space, which helps bridge unaligned images and texts, and align the visual and textual semantic spaces on different types of corpora. The experiments show that our grounded learning method can improve textual and visual semantic alignment for improving performance on various cross-modal tasks. Moreover, benefiting from effective joint modeling of different types of corpora, our model also achieves impressive performance on single-modal visual and textual tasks. Our code and models are public at the UNIMO project page https://unimo-ptm.github.io/.