Multi-modal Alignment using Representation Codebook

Aligning signals from different modalities is an important step in vision-language representation learning as it affects the performance of later stages such as cross-modality fusion. Since image and text typically reside in different regions of the feature space, directly aligning them at instance level is challenging especially when features are still evolving during training. In this paper, we propose to align at a higher and more stable level using cluster representation. Specifically, we treat image and text as two "views" of the same entity, and encode them into a joint vision-language coding space spanned by a dictionary of cluster centers (codebook). We contrast positive and negative samples via their cluster assignments while simultaneously optimizing the cluster centers. To further smooth out the learning process, we adopt a teacher-student distillation paradigm, where the momentum teacher of one view guides the student learning of the other. We evaluated our approach on common vision language benchmarks and obtain new SoTA on zero-shot cross modality retrieval while being competitive on various other transfer tasks.

Vision-Language Pre-Training with Triple Contrastive Learning

Vision-language representation learning largely benefits from image-text alignment through contrastive losses (e.g., InfoNCE loss). The success of this alignment strategy is attributed to its capability in maximizing the mutual information (MI) between an image and its matched text. However, simply performing cross-modal alignment (CMA) ignores data potential within each modality, which may result in degraded representations. For instance, although CMA-based models are able to map image-text pairs close together in the embedding space, they fail to ensure that similar inputs from the same modality stay close by. This problem can get even worse when the pre-training data is noisy. In this paper, we propose triple contrastive learning (TCL) for vision-language pre-training by leveraging both cross-modal and intra-modal self-supervision. Besides CMA, TCL introduces an intra-modal contrastive objective to provide complementary benefits in representation learning. To take advantage of localized and structural information from image and text input, TCL further maximizes the average MI between local regions of image/text and their global summary. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work that takes into account local structure information for multi-modality representation learning. Experimental evaluations show that our approach is competitive and achieve the new state of the art on various common down-stream vision-language tasks such as image-text retrieval and visual question answering.

Magic Pyramid: Accelerating Inference with Early Exiting and Token Pruning

Pre-training and then fine-tuning large language models is commonly used to achieve state-of-the-art performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, most pre-trained models suffer from low inference speed. Deploying such large models to applications with latency constraints is challenging. In this work, we focus on accelerating the inference via conditional computations. To achieve this, we propose a novel idea, Magic Pyramid (MP), to reduce both width-wise and depth-wise computation via token pruning and early exiting for Transformer-based models, particularly BERT. The former manages to save the computation via removing non-salient tokens, while the latter can fulfill the computation reduction by terminating the inference early before reaching the final layer, if the exiting condition is met. Our empirical studies demonstrate that compared to previous state of arts, MP is not only able to achieve a speed-adjustable inference but also to surpass token pruning and early exiting by reducing up to 70% giga floating point operations (GFLOPs) with less than 0.5% accuracy drop. Token pruning and early exiting express distinctive preferences to sequences with different lengths. However, MP is capable of achieving an average of 8.06x speedup on two popular text classification tasks, regardless of the sizes of the inputs.

MLIM: Vision-and-Language Model Pre-training with Masked Language and Image Modeling

Vision-and-Language Pre-training (VLP) improves model performance for downstream tasks that require image and text inputs. Current VLP approaches differ on (i) model architecture (especially image embedders), (ii) loss functions, and (iii) masking policies. Image embedders are either deep models like ResNet or linear projections that directly feed image-pixels into the transformer. Typically, in addition to the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) loss, alignment-based objectives are used for cross-modality interaction, and RoI feature regression and classification tasks for Masked Image-Region Modeling (MIRM). Both alignment and MIRM objectives mostly do not have ground truth. Alignment-based objectives require pairings of image and text and heuristic objective functions. MIRM relies on object detectors. Masking policies either do not take advantage of multi-modality or are strictly coupled with alignments generated by other models. In this paper, we present Masked Language and Image Modeling (MLIM) for VLP. MLIM uses two loss functions: Masked Language Modeling (MLM) loss and image reconstruction (RECON) loss. We propose Modality Aware Masking (MAM) to boost cross-modality interaction and take advantage of MLM and RECON losses that separately capture text and image reconstruction quality. Using MLM + RECON tasks coupled with MAM, we present a simplified VLP methodology and show that it has better downstream task performance on a proprietary e-commerce multi-modal dataset.

Tiering as a Stochastic Submodular Optimization Problem

Tiering is an essential technique for building large-scale information retrieval systems. While the selection of documents for high priority tiers critically impacts the efficiency of tiering, past work focuses on optimizing it with respect to a static set of queries in the history, and generalizes poorly to the future traffic. Instead, we formulate the optimal tiering as a stochastic optimization problem, and follow the methodology of regularized empirical risk minimization to maximize the \emph{generalization performance} of the system. We also show that the optimization problem can be cast as a stochastic submodular optimization problem with a submodular knapsack constraint, and we develop efficient optimization algorithms by leveraging this connection.