No Arabic abstract
We review the current schemes of text-image matching models and propose improvements for both training and inference. First, we empirically show limitations of two popular loss (sum and max-margin loss) widely used in training text-image embeddings and propose a trade-off: a kNN-margin loss which 1) utilizes information from hard negatives and 2) is robust to noise as all $K$-most hardest samples are taken into account, tolerating emph{pseudo} negatives and outliers. Second, we advocate the use of Inverted Softmax (textsc{Is}) and Cross-modal Local Scaling (textsc{Csls}) during inference to mitigate the so-called hubness problem in high-dimensional embedding space, enhancing scores of all metrics by a large margin.
The hubness problem widely exists in high-dimensional embedding space and is a fundamental source of error for cross-modal matching tasks. In this work, we study the emergence of hubs in Visual Semantic Embeddings (VSE) with application to text-image matching. We analyze the pros and cons of two widely adopted optimization objectives for training VSE and propose a novel hubness-aware loss function (HAL) that addresses previous methods defects. Unlike (Faghri et al.2018) which simply takes the hardest sample within a mini-batch, HAL takes all samples into account, using both local and global statistics to scale up the weights of hubs. We experiment our method with various configurations of model architectures and datasets. The method exhibits exceptionally good robustness and brings consistent improvement on the task of text-image matching across all settings. Specifically, under the same model architectures as (Faghri et al. 2018) and (Lee at al. 2018), by switching only the learning objective, we report a maximum R@1improvement of 7.4% on MS-COCO and 8.3% on Flickr30k.
Image captioning has demonstrated models that are capable of generating plausible text given input images or videos. Further, recent work in image generation has shown significant improvements in image quality when text is used as a prior. Our work ties these concepts together by creating an architecture that can enable bidirectional generation of images and text. We call this network Multi-Modal Vector Representation (MMVR). Along with MMVR, we propose two improvements to the text conditioned image generation. Firstly, a n-gram metric based cost function is introduced that generalizes the caption with respect to the image. Secondly, multiple semantically similar sentences are shown to help in generating better images. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that MMVR improves upon existing text conditioned image generation results by over 20%, while integrating visual and text modalities.
Text-to-Image translation has been an active area of research in the recent past. The ability for a network to learn the meaning of a sentence and generate an accurate image that depicts the sentence shows ability of the model to think more like humans. Popular methods on text to image translation make use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate high quality images based on text input, but the generated images dont always reflect the meaning of the sentence given to the model as input. We address this issue by using a captioning network to caption on generated images and exploit the distance between ground truth captions and generated captions to improve the network further. We show extensive comparisons between our method and existing methods.
Exploring fine-grained relationship between entities(e.g. objects in image or words in sentence) has great contribution to understand multimedia content precisely. Previous attention mechanism employed in image-text matching either takes multiple self attention steps to gather correspondences or uses image objects (or words) as context to infer image-text similarity. However, they only take advantage of semantic information without considering that objects relative position also contributes to image understanding. To this end, we introduce a novel position-aware relation module to model both the semantic and spatial relationship simultaneously for image-text matching in this paper. Given an image, our method utilizes the location of different objects to capture spatial relationship innovatively. With the combination of semantic and spatial relationship, its easier to understand the content of different modalities (images and sentences) and capture fine-grained latent correspondences of image-text pairs. Besides, we employ a two-step aggregated relation module to capture interpretable alignment of image-text pairs. The first step, we call it intra-modal relation mechanism, in which we computes responses between different objects in an image or different words in a sentence separately; The second step, we call it inter-modal relation mechanism, in which the query plays a role of textual context to refine the relationship among object proposals in an image. In this way, our position-aware aggregated relation network (ParNet) not only knows which entities are relevant by attending on different objects (words) adaptively, but also adjust the inter-modal correspondence according to the latent alignments according to querys content. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art results on MS-COCO dataset.
Machine learning algorithms are often vulnerable to adversarial examples that have imperceptible alterations from the original counterparts but can fool the state-of-the-art models. It is helpful to evaluate or even improve the robustness of these models by exposing the maliciously crafted adversarial examples. In this paper, we present TextFooler, a simple but strong baseline to generate natural adversarial text. By applying it to two fundamental natural language tasks, text classification and textual entailment, we successfully attacked three target models, including the powerful pre-trained BERT, and the widely used convolutional and recurrent neural networks. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework in three ways: (1) effective---it outperforms state-of-the-art attacks in terms of success rate and perturbation rate, (2) utility-preserving---it preserves semantic content and grammaticality, and remains correctly classified by humans, and (3) efficient---it generates adversarial text with computational complexity linear to the text length. *The code, pre-trained target models, and test examples are available at https://github.com/jind11/TextFooler.