Abstract
Image-text retrieval is a fundamental task to bridge the semantic gap between natural language and vision. Recent works primarily focus on aligning textual meanings with visual appearance. However, they often overlook the semantic discrepancy caused by syntactic structure in natural language expressions and relationships among visual entities. This oversight would lead to sub-optimal alignment and degraded retrieval performance, since the underlying semantic dependencies and object interactions remain inadequately encoded in both textual and visual embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel Visual-Linguistic Dependency Encoding (VL-DE) framework, which explicitly models the dependency information among textual words and interaction patterns between image regions, improving the discriminative power of cross-modal representations for more accurate image-text retrieval. Specifically, VL-DE enhances textual representations by considering syntactic relationships and dependency types, and visual representations by attending to its spatially neighboring regions. Cross-attention mechanism is then introduced to aggregate aligned region-word pairs into image-text similarities. Analysis on Winoground, a dataset specially designed to measure vision-linguistic compositional structure reasoning, shows that VL-DE outperforms existing methods, demonstrating its effectiveness at this task. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmarks, Flickr30K and MS-COCO, further validates the competitiveness of our approach.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.1511
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 17384–17396
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1511
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Wenxin Guo, Lei Zhang, Kun Zhang, Yi Liu, and Zhendong Mao. 2024. Visual-Linguistic Dependency Encoding for Image-Text Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 17384–17396, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Visual-Linguistic Dependency Encoding for Image-Text Retrieval (Guo et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.1511.pdf