Language-Agnostic Visual-Semantic Embeddings

Jonatas Wehrmann, Douglas M. Souza, Mauricio A. Lopes, Rodrigo C. Barros; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 5804-5813

Abstract


This paper proposes a framework for training language-invariant cross-modal retrieval models. We also introduce a novel character-based word-embedding approach, allowing the model to project similar words across languages into the same word-embedding space. In addition, by performing cross-modal retrieval at the character level, the storage requirements for a text encoder decrease substantially, allowing for lighter and more scalable retrieval architectures. The proposed language-invariant textual encoder based on characters is virtually unaffected in terms of storage requirements when novel languages are added to the system. Our contributions include new methods for building character-level-based word-embeddings, an improved loss function, and a novel cross-language alignment module that not only makes the architecture language-invariant, but also presents better predictive performance. We show that our models outperform the current state-of-the-art in both single and multi-language scenarios. This work can be seen as the basis of a new path on retrieval research, now allowing for the effective use of captions in multiple-language scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/jwehrmann/lavse.

Related Material


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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Wehrmann_2019_ICCV,
author = {Wehrmann, Jonatas and Souza, Douglas M. and Lopes, Mauricio A. and Barros, Rodrigo C.},
title = {Language-Agnostic Visual-Semantic Embeddings},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
month = {October},
year = {2019}
}