No Arabic abstract
Vision-language pre-training (VLP) on large-scale image-text pairs has recently witnessed rapid progress for learning cross-modal representations. Existing pre-training methods either directly concatenate image representation and text representation at a feature level as input to a single-stream Transformer, or use a two-stream cross-modal Transformer to align the image-text representation at a high-level semantic space. In real-world image-text data, we observe that it is easy for some of the image-text pairs to align simple semantics on both modalities, while others may be related after higher-level abstraction. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new pre-training method SemVLP, which jointly aligns both the low-level and high-level semantics between image and text representations. The model is pre-trained iteratively with two prevalent fashions: single-stream pre-training to align at a fine-grained feature level and two-stream pre-training to align high-level semantics, by employing a shared Transformer network with a pluggable cross-modal attention module. An extensive set of experiments have been conducted on four well-established vision-language understanding tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SemVLP in aligning cross-modal representations towards different semantic granularities.
Pre-trained contextual vision-and-language (V&L) models have achieved impressive performance on various benchmarks. However, existing models require a large amount of parallel image-caption data for pre-training. Such data are costly to collect and require cumbersome curation. Inspired by unsupervised machine translation, we investigate if a strong V&L representation model can be learned through unsupervised pre-training without image-caption corpora. In particular, we propose to conduct ``mask-and-predict pre-training on text-only and image-only corpora and introduce the object tags detected by an object recognition model as anchor points to bridge two modalities. We find that such a simple approach achieves performance close to a model pre-trained with aligned data, on four English V&L benchmarks. Our work challenges the widely held notion that aligned data is necessary for V&L pre-training, while significantly reducing the amount of supervision needed for V&L models.
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.
Vision-language pre-training (VLP) on large-scale image-text pairs has achieved huge success for the cross-modal downstream tasks. The most existing pre-training methods mainly adopt a two-step training procedure, which firstly employs a pre-trained object detector to extract region-based visual features, then concatenates the image representation and text embedding as the input of Transformer to train. However, these methods face problems of using task-specific visual representation of the specific object detector for generic cross-modal understanding, and the computation inefficiency of two-stage pipeline. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end vision-language pre-trained model for both V+L understanding and generation, namely E2E-VLP, where we build a unified Transformer framework to jointly learn visual representation, and semantic alignments between image and text. We incorporate the tasks of object detection and image captioning into pre-training with a unified Transformer encoder-decoder architecture for enhancing visual learning. An extensive set of experiments have been conducted on well-established vision-language downstream tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of this novel VLP paradigm.
Existing approaches to vision-language pre-training (VLP) heavily rely on an object detector based on bounding boxes (regions), where salient objects are first detected from images and then a Transformer-based model is used for cross-modal fusion. Despite their superior performance, these approaches are bounded by the capability of the object detector in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. Besides, the presence of object detection imposes unnecessary constraints on model designs and makes it difficult to support end-to-end training. In this paper, we revisit grid-based convolutional features for vision-language pre-training, skipping the expensive region-related steps. We propose a simple yet effective grid-based VLP method that works surprisingly well with the grid features. By pre-training only with in-domain datasets, the proposed Grid-VLP method can outperform most competitive region-based VLP methods on three examined vision-language understanding tasks. We hope that our findings help to further advance the state of the art of vision-language pre-training, and provide a new direction towards effective and efficient VLP.
Recent success of pre-trained language models (LMs) has spurred widespread interest in the language capabilities that they possess. However, efforts to understand whether LM representations are useful for symbolic reasoning tasks have been limited and scattered. In this work, we propose eight reasoning tasks, which conceptually require operations such as comparison, conjunction, and composition. A fundamental challenge is to understand whether the performance of a LM on a task should be attributed to the pre-trained representations or to the process of fine-tuning on the task data. To address this, we propose an evaluation protocol that includes both zero-shot evaluation (no fine-tuning), as well as comparing the learning curve of a fine-tuned LM to the learning curve of multiple controls, which paints a rich picture of the LM capabilities. Our main findings are that: (a) different LMs exhibit qualitatively different reasoning abilities, e.g., RoBERTa succeeds in reasoning tasks where BERT fails completely; (b) LMs do not reason in an abstract manner and are context-dependent, e.g., while RoBERTa can compare ages, it can do so only when the ages are in the typical range of human ages; (c) On half of our reasoning tasks all models fail completely. Our findings and infrastructure can help future work on designing new datasets, models and objective functions for pre-training.