A strong and robust baseline for text-image matching

Abstract

We review the current schemes of text-image matching models and propose improvements for both training and inference. First, we empirically show limitations of two popular loss (sum and max-margin loss) widely used in training text-image embeddings and propose a trade-off: a kNN-margin loss which 1) utilizes information from hard negatives and 2) is robust to noise as all K-most hardest samples are taken into account, tolerating pseudo negatives and outliers. Second, we advocate the use of Inverted Softmax (IS) and Crossmodal Local Scaling (CSLS) during inference to mitigate the so-called hubness problem in high-dimensional embedding space, enhancing scores of all metrics by a large margin.