Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision
Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text, in our own words: the license "arXiv — non-exclusive license to distribute" does not allow redistributing the text itself. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2102.05918
Summary
Most visual and vision-language models are pre-trained on curated datasets such as ImageNet, OpenImages or Conceptual Captions. Building these requires costly annotation and cleaning, which keeps them small. Vision-language corpora in particular stay around ~10M examples. This paper asks whether sheer data volume can make up for label noise. The authors from Google Research gathered English image alt-text pairs using the Conceptual Captions collection procedure. They replaced its elaborate cleaning with a few cheap frequency-based filters, yielding about 1.8B noisy pairs.
On this data they trained ALIGN, a plain dual-encoder model. It pairs an EfficientNet image tower with a BERT text tower, both trained from scratch. A symmetric normalized-softmax contrastive loss uses in-batch negatives and a learned temperature. Despite its simplicity, ALIGN sets new state-of-the-art results on Flickr30K and MSCOCO retrieval, beating heavier cross-attention models. It also performs strongly on ImageNet, both zero-shot and fine-tuned, and on VTAB. The work shows that large uncurated web data, needing no expert curation, can produce competitive general-purpose representations.
Key points
- Dataset: about 1.8B image–alt-text pairs, roughly 100 times larger than Conceptual Captions. The filters were:
- images: shorter side above 200 px, aspect ratio below 3;
- alt-texts: dropped if shared by more than 10 images or containing rare tokens;
- text length: 3–20 unigrams;
- near-duplicates of test images were removed.
- Image-only results: 76.4% zero-shot top-1 on ImageNet, using class names as text queries. Fine-tuned ImageNet top-1 reaches 88.64%.
- Retrieval results: on Flickr30K and MSCOCO, ALIGN beats the prior best by over 7% on most zero-shot and fine-tuned R@1 metrics.
- Compositional queries: embeddings can be added and subtracted, enabling search with combined image+text queries.
- Multilingual model: ALIGN_mling was trained on 1.8B pairs covering 100+ languages with a 250k wordpiece vocabulary.
- Zero-shot on Multi30k, it outperforms M3P in every language, by up to +57.8 mR on French.
- Its zero-shot scores are roughly on par with fine-tuned M3P and UC2, except on Czech.
Cited by
- Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning
- Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond
- PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model
- InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks
- ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions
- Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?
- Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models
- ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All
- Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Models: A Comprehensive Survey
- CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning
- Editing Models with Task Arithmetic
- Segment Anything
- OBELICS: An Open Web-Scale Filtered Dataset of Interleaved Image-Text Documents
- BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation
- BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models
- OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Models
- Text and Code Embeddings by Contrastive Pre-Training
- Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding
- LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs
- LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models
- Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models
- SimVLM: Simple Visual Language Model Pretraining with Weak Supervision
- Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training
- Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time
- CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models
- MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI
- Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language
- LLaMA-Adapter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models with Zero-init Attention
Cite
@misc{jia2021scaling,
title = {{Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision}},
author = {Jia, Chao and Yang, Yinfei and Xia, Ye and Chen, Yi-Ting and Parekh, Zarana and Pham, Hieu and Le, Quoc V. and Sung, Yunhsuan and Li, Zhen and Duerig, Tom},
year = {2021},
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2102.05918},
eprint = {2102.05918},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2102.05918}
}References
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