Given an image and a corresponding caption, the Phrase Grounding task aims to ground each entity mentioned by a noun phrase in the caption to a region in the image.
VisualBERT aims to reuse self-attention to implicitly align elements of the input text and regions in the input image. Visual embeddings are used to model images where the representations are represented by a bounding region in an image obtained from an object detector. These visual embeddings are constructed by summing three embeddings: 1) visual feature representation, 2) a segment embedding indicate whether it is an image embedding, and 3) position embedding. Essentially, image regions and language are combined with a Transformer to allow self-attention to discover implicit alignments between language and vision. VisualBERT is trained using COCO, which consists of images paired with captions. It is pre-trained using two objectives: masked language modeling objective and sentence-image prediction task. It can then be fine-tuned on different downstream tasks.
MDETR is an end-to-end modulated detector that detects objects in an image conditioned on a raw text query, like a caption or a question. It utilizes a transformer-based architecture to reason jointly over text and image by fusing the two modalities at an early stage of the model. The network is pre-trained on 1.3M text-image pairs, mined from pre-existing multi-modal datasets having explicit alignment between phrases in text and objects in the image. The network is then fine-tuned on several downstream tasks such as phrase grounding, referring expression comprehension and segmentation.