Image-to-Text Retrieval

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), consisting of a simplified version of ConVIRT trained from scratch, is an efficient method of image representation learning from natural language supervision. , CLIP jointly trains an image encoder and a text encoder to predict the correct pairings of a batch of (image, text) training examples. At test time the learned text encoder synthesizes a zero-shot linear classifier by embedding the names or descriptions of the target dataset’s classes. For pre-training, CLIP is trained to predict which of the $N X N$ possible (image, text) pairings across a batch actually occurred. CLIP learns a multi-modal embedding space by jointly training an image encoder and text encoder to maximize the cosine similarity of the image and text embeddings of the $N$ real pairs in the batch while minimizing the cosine similarity of the embeddings of the $N^2 - N$ incorrect pairings. A symmetric cross entropy loss is optimized over these similarity scores. Image credit: Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision

OSCAR is a new learning method that uses object tags detected in images as anchor points to ease the learning of image-text alignment. The model take a triple as input (word-tag-region) and pre-trained with two losses (masked token loss over words and tags, and a contrastive loss between tags and others). OSCAR represents an image-text pair into semantic space via dictionary lookup. Object tags are used as anchor points to align image regions with word embeddings of pre-trained language models. The model is then fine-tuned for understanding and generation 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.

FLAVA aims at building a single holistic universal model that targets all modalities at once. FLAVA is a language vision alignment model that learns strong representations from multimodal data (image-text pairs) and unimodal data (unpaired images and text). The model consists of an image encode transformer to capture unimodal image representations, a text encoder transformer to process unimodal text information, and a multimodal encode transformer that takes as input the encoded unimodal image and text and integrates their representations for multimodal reasoning. During pretraining, masked image modeling (MIM) and mask language modeling (MLM) losses are applied onto the image and text encoders over a single image or a text piece, respectively, while contrastive, masked multimodal modeling (MMM), and image-text matching (ITM) loss are used over paired image-text data. For downstream tasks, classification heads are applied on the outputs from the image, text, and multimodal encoders respectively for visual recognition, language understanding, and multimodal reasoning tasks It can be applied to broad scope of tasks from three domains (visual recognition, language understanding, and multimodal reasoning) under a common transformer model architecture.

In this work, we present a conceptually simple and effective method to train a strong bilingual multimodal representation model. Starting from the pretrained multimodal representation model CLIP released by OpenAI, we switched its text encoder with a pretrained multilingual text encoder XLM-R, and aligned both languages and image representations by a two-stage training schema consisting of teacher learning and contrastive learning. We validate our method through evaluations of a wide range of tasks. We set new state-of-the-art performances on a bunch of tasks including ImageNet-CN, Flicker30k- CN, and COCO-CN. Further, we obtain very close performances with CLIP on almost all tasks, suggesting that one can simply alter the text encoder in CLIP for extended capabilities such as multilingual understanding. Our models and code are available at https://github.com/FlagAI-Open/FlagAI.

Proposes a two-tower pre-training model called BriVL within the cross-modal contrastive learning framework. A cross-modal pre-training model is defined based on the image-text retrieval task. The main goal is thus to learn two encoders that can embed image and text samples into the same space for effective image-text retrieval. To enforce such cross-modal embedding learning, we introduce contrastive learning with the InfoNCE loss into the BriVL model. Given text embedding, the learning objective aims to find the best image embedding from a batch of image embeddings. Similarly, for a given image embedding, the learning objective is to find the best text embedding from a batch of text embeddings. The pre-training model learns a cross-modal embedding space by jointly training the image and text encoders to maximize the cosine similarity of the image and text embeddings of the true pair for each sample in the batch while minimizing the cosine similarity of the embeddings of the other incorrect pairs.

In this work, we present a conceptually simple and effective method to train a strong bilingual multimodal representation model. Starting from the pretrained multimodal representation model CLIP released by OpenAI, we switched its text encoder with a pretrained multilingual text encoder XLM-R, and aligned both languages and image representations by a two-stage training schema consisting of teacher learning and contrastive learning. We validate our method through evaluations of a wide range of tasks. We set new state-of-the-art performances on a bunch of tasks including ImageNet-CN, Flicker30k- CN, and COCO-CN. Further, we obtain very close performances with CLIP on almost all tasks, suggesting that one can simply alter the text encoder in CLIP for extended capabilities such as multilingual understanding. Our models and code are available at https://github.com/FlagAI-Open/FlagAI.