Cross Modal Retrieval With Querybank Normalisation

Simion-Vlad Bogolin, Ioana Croitoru, Hailin Jin, Yang Liu, Samuel Albanie; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 5194-5205

Abstract


Profiting from large-scale training datasets, advances in neural architecture design and efficient inference, joint embeddings have become the dominant approach for tackling cross-modal retrieval. In this work we first show that, despite their effectiveness, state-of-the-art joint embeddings suffer significantly from the longstanding "hubness problem" in which a small number of gallery embeddings form the nearest neighbours of many queries. Drawing inspiration from the NLP literature, we formulate a simple but effective framework called Querybank Normalisation (QB-Norm) that re-normalises query similarities to account for hubs in the embedding space. QB-Norm improves retrieval performance without requiring retraining. Differently from prior work, we show that QB-Norm works effectively without concurrent access to any test set queries. Within the QB-Norm framework, we also propose a novel similarity normalisation method, the Dynamic Inverted Softmax, that is significantly more robust than existing approaches. We showcase QB-Norm across a range of cross modal retrieval models and benchmarks where it consistently enhances strong baselines beyond the state of the art. Code is available at https://vladbogo.github.io/QB-Norm/.

Related Material


[pdf] [supp] [arXiv]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Bogolin_2022_CVPR, author = {Bogolin, Simion-Vlad and Croitoru, Ioana and Jin, Hailin and Liu, Yang and Albanie, Samuel}, title = {Cross Modal Retrieval With Querybank Normalisation}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)}, month = {June}, year = {2022}, pages = {5194-5205} }