MAF: Multimodal Alignment Framework for Weakly-Supervised Phrase Grounding

Qinxin Wang, Hao Tan, Sheng Shen, Michael Mahoney, Zhewei Yao


Abstract
Phrase localization is a task that studies the mapping from textual phrases to regions of an image. Given difficulties in annotating phrase-to-object datasets at scale, we develop a Multimodal Alignment Framework (MAF) to leverage more widely-available caption-image datasets, which can then be used as a form of weak supervision. We first present algorithms to model phrase-object relevance by leveraging fine-grained visual representations and visually-aware language representations. By adopting a contrastive objective, our method uses information in caption-image pairs to boost the performance in weakly-supervised scenarios. Experiments conducted on the widely-adopted Flickr30k dataset show a significant improvement over existing weakly-supervised methods. With the help of the visually-aware language representations, we can also improve the previous best unsupervised result by 5.56%. We conduct ablation studies to show that both our novel model and our weakly-supervised strategies significantly contribute to our strong results.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.159
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2030–2038
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.159
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.159
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qinxin Wang, Hao Tan, Sheng Shen, Michael Mahoney, and Zhewei Yao. 2020. MAF: Multimodal Alignment Framework for Weakly-Supervised Phrase Grounding. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 2030–2038, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MAF: Multimodal Alignment Framework for Weakly-Supervised Phrase Grounding (Wang et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.159.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.emnlp-main.159.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939046
Code
 qinzzz/Multimodal-Alignment-Framework
Data
MS COCOVisual Genome