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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.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: AI & machine learning

Cited by

362 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 28 of them have a page here, 334 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2102.05918 · arXiv 2102.05918

@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}
}

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