Progressive Learning for Image Retrieval with Hybrid-Modality Queries

Image retrieval with hybrid-modality queries, also known as composing text and image for image retrieval (CTI-IR), is a retrieval task where the search intention is expressed in a more complex query format, involving both vision and text modalities. For example, a target product image is searched using a reference product image along with text about changing certain attributes of the reference image as the query. It is a more challenging image retrieval task that requires both semantic space learning and cross-modal fusion. Previous approaches that attempt to deal with both aspects achieve unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we decompose the CTI-IR task into a three-stage learning problem to progressively learn the complex knowledge for image retrieval with hybrid-modality queries. We first leverage the semantic embedding space for open-domain image-text retrieval, and then transfer the learned knowledge to the fashion-domain with fashion-related pre-training tasks. Finally, we enhance the pre-trained model from single-query to hybrid-modality query for the CTI-IR task. Furthermore, as the contribution of individual modality in the hybrid-modality query varies for different retrieval scenarios, we propose a self-supervised adaptive weighting strategy to dynamically determine the importance of image and text in the hybrid-modality query for better retrieval. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the mean of Recall@K by 24.9% and 9.5% on the Fashion-IQ and Shoes benchmark datasets respectively.

WenLan: Bridging Vision and Language by Large-Scale Multi-Modal Pre-Training

Multi-modal pre-training models have been intensively explored to bridge vision and language in recent years. However, most of them explicitly model the cross-modal interaction between image-text pairs, by assuming that there exists strong semantic correlation between the text and image modalities. Since this strong assumption is often invalid in real-world scenarios, we choose to implicitly model the cross-modal correlation for large-scale multi-modal pre-training, which is the focus of the Chinese project `WenLan' led by our team. Specifically, with the weak correlation assumption over image-text pairs, we propose a two-tower pre-training model called BriVL within the cross-modal contrastive learning framework. Unlike OpenAI CLIP that adopts a simple contrastive learning method, we devise a more advanced algorithm by adapting the latest method MoCo into the cross-modal scenario. By building a large queue-based dictionary, our BriVL can incorporate more negative samples in limited GPU resources. We further construct a large Chinese multi-source image-text dataset called RUC-CAS-WenLan for pre-training our BriVL model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the pre-trained BriVL model outperforms both UNITER and OpenAI CLIP on various downstream tasks.

The End-of-End-to-End: A Video Understanding Pentathlon Challenge (2020)

We present a new video understanding pentathlon challenge, an open competition held in conjunction with the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020. The objective of the challenge was to explore and evaluate new methods for text-to-video retrieval-the task of searching for content within a corpus of videos using natural language queries. This report summarizes the results of the first edition of the challenge together with the findings of the participants.

Team RUC_AIM3 Technical Report at Activitynet 2020 Task 2: Exploring Sequential Events Detection for Dense Video Captioning

Detecting meaningful events in an untrimmed video is essential for dense video captioning. In this work, we propose a novel and simple model for event sequence generation and explore temporal relationships of the event sequence in the video. The proposed model omits inefficient two-stage proposal generation and directly generates event boundaries conditioned on bi-directional temporal dependency in one pass. Experimental results show that the proposed event sequence generation model can generate more accurate and diverse events within a small number of proposals. For the event captioning, we follow our previous work to employ the intra-event captioning models into our pipeline system. The overall system achieves state-of-the-art performance on the dense-captioning events in video task with 9.894 METEOR score on the challenge testing set.

Fine-grained Video-Text Retrieval with Hierarchical Graph Reasoning

Cross-modal retrieval between videos and texts has attracted growing attentions due to the rapid emergence of videos on the web. The current dominant approach for this problem is to learn a joint embedding space to measure cross-modal similarities. However, simple joint embeddings are insufficient to represent complicated visual and textual details, such as scenes, objects, actions and their compositions. To improve fine-grained video-text retrieval, we propose a Hierarchical Graph Reasoning (HGR) model, which decomposes video-text matching into global-to-local levels. To be specific, the model disentangles texts into hierarchical semantic graph including three levels of events, actions, entities and relationships across levels. Attention-based graph reasoning is utilized to generate hierarchical textual embeddings, which can guide the learning of diverse and hierarchical video representations. The HGR model aggregates matchings from different video-text levels to capture both global and local details. Experimental results on three video-text datasets demonstrate the advantages of our model. Such hierarchical decomposition also enables better generalization across datasets and improves the ability to distinguish fine-grained semantic differences.

Integrating Temporal and Spatial Attentions for VATEX Video Captioning Challenge 2019

This notebook paper presents our model in the VATEX video captioning challenge. In order to capture multi-level aspects in the video, we propose to integrate both temporal and spatial attentions for video captioning. The temporal attentive module focuses on global action movements while spatial attentive module enables to describe more fine-grained objects. Considering these two types of attentive modules are complementary, we thus fuse them via a late fusion strategy. The proposed model significantly outperforms baselines and achieves 73.4 CIDEr score on the testing set which ranks the second place at the VATEX video captioning challenge leaderboard 2019.

Unpaired Cross-lingual Image Caption Generation with Self-Supervised Rewards

Generating image descriptions in different languages is essential to satisfy users worldwide. However, it is prohibitively expensive to collect large-scale paired image-caption dataset for every target language which is critical for training descent image captioning models. Previous works tackle the unpaired cross-lingual image captioning problem through a pivot language, which is with the help of paired image-caption data in the pivot language and pivot-to-target machine translation models. However, such language-pivoted approach suffers from inaccuracy brought by the pivot-to-target translation, including disfluency and visual irrelevancy errors. In this paper, we propose to generate cross-lingual image captions with self-supervised rewards in the reinforcement learning framework to alleviate these two types of errors. We employ self-supervision from mono-lingual corpus in the target language to provide fluency reward, and propose a multi-level visual semantic matching model to provide both sentence-level and concept-level visual relevancy rewards. We conduct extensive experiments for unpaired cross-lingual image captioning in both English and Chinese respectively on two widely used image caption corpora. The proposed approach achieves significant performance improvement over state-of-the-art methods.