Learning Visual Representations via Language-Guided Sampling

Although an object may appear in numerous contexts, we often describe it in a limited number of ways. This happens because language abstracts away visual variation to represent and communicate concepts. Building on this intuition, we propose an alternative approach to visual learning: using language similarity to sample semantically similar image pairs for contrastive learning. Our approach deviates from image-based contrastive learning by using language to sample pairs instead of hand-crafted augmentations or learned clusters. Our approach also deviates from image-text contrastive learning by relying on pre-trained language models to guide the learning rather than minimize a cross-modal similarity. Through a series of experiments, we show that language-guided learning can learn better features than both image-image and image-text representation learning approaches.