Text Retrieval

In the ALIGN method, visual and language representations are jointly trained from noisy image alt-text data. The image and text encoders are learned via contrastive loss (formulated as normalized softmax) that pushes the embeddings of the matched image-text pair together and pushing those of non-matched image-text pair apart. The model learns to align visual and language representations of the image and text pairs using the contrastive loss. The representations can be used for vision-only or vision-language task transfer. Without any fine-tuning, ALIGN powers zero-shot visual classification and cross-modal search including image-to-text search, text-to image search and even search with joint image+text queries.

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has advanced the performance for many vision-language tasks. However, most existing pre-trained models only excel in either understanding-based tasks or generation-based tasks. Furthermore, performance improvement has been largely achieved by scaling up the dataset with noisy image-text pairs collected from the web, which is a suboptimal source of supervision. In this paper, we propose BLIP, a new VLP framework which transfers flexibly to both vision-language understanding and generation tasks. BLIP effectively utilizes the noisy web data by bootstrapping the captions, where a captioner generates synthetic captions and a filter removes the noisy ones. We achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language tasks, such as image-text retrieval (+2.7% in average recall@1), image captioning (+2.8% in CIDEr), and VQA (+1.6% in VQA score). BLIP also demonstrates strong generalization ability when directly transferred to video-language tasks in a zero-shot manner. Code, models, and datasets are released at https://github.com/salesforce/BLIP.

UNITER or UNiversal Image-TExt Representation model is a large-scale pre-trained model for joint multimodal embedding. It is pre-trained using four image-text datasets COCO, Visual Genome, Conceptual Captions, and SBU Captions. It can power heterogeneous downstream V+L tasks with joint multimodal embeddings. UNITER takes the visual regions of the image and textual tokens of the sentence as inputs. A faster R-CNN is used in Image Embedder to extract the visual features of each region and a Text Embedder is used to tokenize the input sentence into WordPieces. It proposes WRA via the Optimal Transport to provide more fine-grained alignment between word tokens and image regions that is effective in calculating the minimum cost of transporting the contextualized image embeddings to word embeddings and vice versa. Four pretraining tasks were designed for this model. They are Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Masked Region Modeling (MRM, with three variants), Image-Text Matching (ITM), and Word-Region Alignment (WRA). This model is different from the previous models because it uses conditional masking on pre-training tasks.

ALBEF introduces a contrastive loss to align the image and text representations before fusing them through cross-modal attention. This enables more grounded vision and language representation learning. ALBEF also doesn't require bounding box annotations. The model consists of an image encode, a text encoder, and a multimodal encoder. The image-text contrastive loss helps to align the unimodal representations of an image-text pair before fusion. The image-text matching loss and a masked language modeling loss are applied to learn multimodal interactions between image and text. In addition, momentum distillation is used to generate pseudo-targets. This improves learning with noisy data.

CAMoE is a multi-stream Corpus Alignment network with single gate Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) for video-text retrieval. The CAMoE employs Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to extract multi-perspective video representations, including action, entity, scene, etc., then align them with the corresponding part of the text. A Dual Softmax Loss (DSL) is used to avoid the one-way optimum-match which occurs in previous contrastive methods. Introducing the intrinsic prior of each pair in a batch, DSL serves as a reviser to correct the similarity matrix and achieves the dual optimal match.

Pixel-BERT is a pre-trained model trained to align image pixels with text. The end-to-end framework includes a CNN-based visual encoder and cross-modal transformers for visual and language embedding learning. This model has three parts: one fully convolutional neural network that takes pixels of an image as input, one word-level token embedding based on BERT, and a multimodal transformer for jointly learning visual and language embedding. For language, it uses other pretraining works to use Masked Language Modeling (MLM) to predict masked tokens with surrounding text and images. For vision, it uses the random pixel sampling mechanism that makes up for the challenge of predicting pixel-level features. This mechanism is also suitable for solving overfitting issues and improving the robustness of visual features. It applies Image-Text Matching (ITM) to classify whether an image and a sentence pair match for vision and language interaction. Image captioning is required to understand language and visual semantics for cross-modality tasks like VQA. Region-based visual features extracted from object detection models like Faster RCNN are used for better performance in the newer version of the model.

Multimodal alignment between language and vision is the fundamental topic in current vision-language model research. Contrastive Captioners (CoCa), as a representative method, integrates Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) and Image Caption (IC) into a unified framework, resulting in impressive results. CLIP imposes a bidirectional constraints on global representation of entire images and sentences. Although IC conducts an unidirectional image-to-text generation on local representation, it lacks any constraint on local text-to-image reconstruction, which limits the ability to understand images at a fine-grained level when aligned with texts. To achieve multimodal alignment from both global and local perspectives, this paper proposes Symmetrizing Contrastive Captioners (SyCoCa), which introduces bidirectional interactions on images and texts across the global and local representation levels. Specifically, we expand a Text-Guided Masked Image Modeling (TG-MIM) head based on ITC and IC heads. The improved SyCoCa can further leverage textual cues to reconstruct contextual images and visual cues to predict textual contents. When implementing bidirectional local interactions, the local contents of images tend to be cluttered or unrelated to their textual descriptions. Thus, we employ an attentive masking strategy to select effective image patches for interaction. Extensive experiments on five vision-language tasks, including image-text retrieval, image-captioning, visual question answering, and zero-shot/finetuned image classification, validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

VLMo is a unified vision-language pre-trained model that jointly learns a dual encoder and a fusion encoder with a modular Transformer network. A Mixture-of-Modality-Experts (MOME) transformer is introduced to encode different modalities which helps it to capture modality-specific information by modality experts, and align content of different modalities by the self-attention module shared across modalities. The model parameters are shared across image-text contrastive learning, masked language modeling, and image-text matching tasks. During fine-tuning, the flexible modeling allows for VLMO to be used as either a dual encoder (i.e., separately encode images and text for retrieval tasks) or a fusion encoder (i.e., jointly encode image-text pairs for better interaction across modalities) Stage-wise pretraining on image-only and text-only data improved the vision-language pre-trained model. The model can be used for classification tasks and fine-tuned as a dual encoder for retrieval tasks.

XGPT is a method of cross-modal generative pre-training for image captioning designed to pre-train text-to-image caption generators through three novel generation tasks, including image-conditioned masked language modeling (IMLM), image-conditioned denoising autoencoding (IDA), and text-conditioned image feature generation (TIGF). The pre-trained XGPT can be fine-tuned without any task-specific architecture modifications and build strong image captioning models.