Unicoder-VL: A Universal Encoder for Vision and Language by Cross-modal Pre-training

16 Aug 2019  ·  Gen Li, Nan Duan, Yuejian Fang, Ming Gong, Daxin Jiang, Ming Zhou ·

We propose Unicoder-VL, a universal encoder that aims to learn joint representations of vision and language in a pre-training manner. Borrow ideas from cross-lingual pre-trained models, such as XLM and Unicoder, both visual and linguistic contents are fed into a multi-layer Transformer for the cross-modal pre-training, where three pre-trained tasks are employed, including Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Masked Object Classification (MOC) and Visual-linguistic Matching (VLM). The first two tasks learn context-aware representations for input tokens based on linguistic and visual contents jointly. The last task tries to predict whether an image and a text describe each other. After pretraining on large-scale image-caption pairs, we transfer Unicoder-VL to caption-based image-text retrieval and visual commonsense reasoning, with just one additional output layer. We achieve state-of-the-art or comparable results on both two tasks and show the powerful ability of the cross-modal pre-training.

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Results from the Paper


Ranked #5 on Image-to-Text Retrieval on MS COCO (Recall@10 metric)

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Image-text matching CommercialAdsDataset Unicoder-VL ADD(S) AUC 83.16 # 7
Image-to-Text Retrieval MS COCO Unicoder-VL Recall@10 97.2 # 5

Methods