FFF: Fixing Flawed Foundations in Contrastive Pre-Training Results in Very Strong Vision-Language Models

Adrian Bulat, Yassine Ouali, Georgios Tzimiropoulos; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 14172-14182

Despite noise and caption quality having been acknowledged as important factors impacting vision-language contrastive pre-training in this paper we show that the full potential of improving the training process by addressing such issues is yet to be realized. Specifically we firstly study and analyze two issues affecting training: incorrect assignment of negative pairs and low caption quality and diversity. Then we devise effective solutions for addressing both problems which essentially require training with multiple true positive pairs. Finally we propose training with sigmoid loss to address such a requirement. We show very large gains over the current state-of-the-art for both image recognition ( +6% on average over 11 datasets) and image retrieval ( +19% on Flickr30k and +15% on MSCOCO).