Learning to Represent Image and Text with Denotation Graph

Bowen Zhang, Hexiang Hu, Vihan Jain, Eugene Ie, Fei Sha


Abstract
Learning to fuse vision and language information and representing them is an important research problem with many applications. Recent progresses have leveraged the ideas of pre-training (from language modeling) and attention layers in Transformers to learn representation from datasets containing images aligned with linguistic expressions that describe the images. In this paper, we propose learning representations from a set of implied, visually grounded expressions between image and text, automatically mined from those datasets. In particular, we use denotation graphs to represent how specific concepts (such as sentences describing images) can be linked to abstract and generic concepts (such as short phrases) that are also visually grounded. This type of generic-to-specific relations can be discovered using linguistic analysis tools. We propose methods to incorporate such relations into learning representation. We show that state-of-the-art multimodal learning models can be further improved by leveraging automatically harvested structural relations. The representations lead to stronger empirical results on downstream tasks of cross-modal image retrieval, referring expression, and compositional attribute-object recognition. Both our codes and the extracted denotation graphs on the Flickr30K and the COCO datasets are publically available on https://sha-lab.github.io/DG.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.60
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
823–839
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.60
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.60
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bowen Zhang, Hexiang Hu, Vihan Jain, Eugene Ie, and Fei Sha. 2020. Learning to Represent Image and Text with Denotation Graph. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 823–839, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Represent Image and Text with Denotation Graph (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.emnlp-main.60.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938839
Data
COCOFlickr30k