IDC: Boost Text-to-image Retrieval via Indirect and Direct Connections

Guowei Ge, Kuangrong Hao, Lingguang Hao


Abstract
The Dual Encoders (DE) framework maps image and text inputs into a coordinated representation space, and calculates their similarity directly. On the other hand, the Cross Attention (CA) framework performs modalities interactions after completing the feature embedding of images and text, and then outputs a similarity score. For scenarios with bulk query requests or large query sets, the latter is more accurate, but the former is faster. Therefore, this work finds a new way to improve the retrieval accuracy of the DE framework by borrowing the advantages of the CA framework. Drawing inspiration from image captioning, we introduce a text decoder in the model training stage to simulate the cross-modal interaction function, like the CA framework. The text decoder is eventually discarded, aligning our model with the DE framework. Finally, to ensure training stability and prevent overfitting, we modify the Self-Distillation from Last Mini-Batch and apply it to the retrieval areas. Extensive experiments conducted on the MSCOCO and Flickr30K datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. Notably, our model achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art approaches on the Flickr30K dataset.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.750
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:
8546–8555
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.750
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guowei Ge, Kuangrong Hao, and Lingguang Hao. 2024. IDC: Boost Text-to-image Retrieval via Indirect and Direct Connections. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 8546–8555, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
IDC: Boost Text-to-image Retrieval via Indirect and Direct Connections (Ge et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.750.pdf