CODER: Coupled Diversity-Sensitive Momentum Contrastive Learning for Image-Text Retrieval
This work addresses a key bottleneck in cross-modal retrieval for applications like search and recommendation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing contrastive learning frameworks.
The paper tackles the challenge of bridging visual and lingual modalities in Image-Text Retrieval by proposing CODER, a novel method that combines diversity-sensitive contrastive learning with external knowledge from commonsense graphs, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks like MSCOCO and Flicker30K.
Image-Text Retrieval (ITR) is challenging in bridging visual and lingual modalities. Contrastive learning has been adopted by most prior arts. Except for limited amount of negative image-text pairs, the capability of constrastive learning is restricted by manually weighting negative pairs as well as unawareness of external knowledge. In this paper, we propose our novel Coupled Diversity-Sensitive Momentum Constrastive Learning (CODER) for improving cross-modal representation. Firstly, a novel diversity-sensitive contrastive learning (DCL) architecture is invented. We introduce dynamic dictionaries for both modalities to enlarge the scale of image-text pairs, and diversity-sensitiveness is achieved by adaptive negative pair weighting. Furthermore, two branches are designed in CODER. One learns instance-level embeddings from image/text, and it also generates pseudo online clustering labels for its input image/text based on their embeddings. Meanwhile, the other branch learns to query from commonsense knowledge graph to form concept-level descriptors for both modalities. Afterwards, both branches leverage DCL to align the cross-modal embedding spaces while an extra pseudo clustering label prediction loss is utilized to promote concept-level representation learning for the second branch. Extensive experiments conducted on two popular benchmarks, i.e. MSCOCO and Flicker30K, validate CODER remarkably outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.