A Strong and Robust Baseline for Text-Image Matching

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 (textscIs) and Cross-modal Local Scaling (textscCsls) during inference to mitigate the so-called hubness problem in high-dimensional embedding space, enhancing scores of all metrics by a large margin.