# VinVL: Revisiting Visual Representations in Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00529 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00529/

## Key facts

- Cited by 110 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2021.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [Self-critical Sequence Training for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00563/) (2016)
- [Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training for Image Captioning and VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11059/) (2019)
- [A Corpus for Reasoning About Natural Language Grounded in Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00491/) (2018)
- [Unicoder-VL: A Universal Encoder for Vision and Language by Cross-modal Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06066/) (2019)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [Large-Scale Adversarial Training for Vision-and-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06195/) (2020)
- [Attention on Attention for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06954/) (2019)
- [Pixel-BERT: Aligning Image Pixels with Text by Deep Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00849/) (2020)
- [12-in-1: Multi-Task Vision and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02315/) (2019)
- [Stacked Attention Networks for Image Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02274/) (2015)
- [UNITER: UNiversal Image-TExt Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11740/) (2019)
- [ERNIE-ViL: Knowledge Enhanced Vision-Language Representations Through Scene Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16934/) (2020)
- [X-Linear Attention Networks for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14080/) (2020)
- [FCOS: A simple and strong anchor-free object detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09214/) (2020)
- [In Defense of Grid Features for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03615/) (2020)
- [Dual-Path Convolutional Image-Text Embeddings with Instance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05535/) (2017)
- [Learning by Abstraction: The Neural State Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03950/) (2019)
- [CAMP: Cross-Modal Adaptive Message Passing for Text-Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05506/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 110)

- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [EmbodiedGPT: Vision-Language Pre-Training via Embodied Chain of Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15021/) (2023)
- [mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12005/) (2022)
- [Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06486/) (2022)
- [mPLUG-2: A Modularized Multi-modal Foundation Model Across Text, Image and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00402/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Pre-training: Basics, Recent Advances, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09263/) (2022)
- [Improving Video-Text Retrieval by Multi-Stream Corpus Alignment and Dual Softmax Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04290/) (2021)
- [The All-Seeing Project: Towards Panoptic Visual Recognition and Understanding of the Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01907/) (2023)
- [Learning to Predict Visual Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09707/) (2021)
- [Super-CLEVR: A Virtual Benchmark to Diagnose Domain Robustness in Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00259/) (2022)
- [Compressing Visual-linguistic Model via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02096/) (2021)
- [E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01804/) (2021)
- [A Simple Multi-Modality Transfer Learning Baseline for Sign Language Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04287/) (2022)
- [Adversarial VQA: A New Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of VQA Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00245/) (2021)
- [xGQA: Cross-Lingual Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06082/) (2021)
- [Cross Modal Retrieval with Querybank Normalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12777/) (2021)
- [Human-Adversarial Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02280/) (2021)
- [LAVIS: A Library for Language-Vision Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09019/) (2022)
- [Towards General Purpose Vision Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00743/) (2021)
- [UFO: A UniFied TransfOrmer for Vision-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10023/) (2021)
- [Playing Lottery Tickets with Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11832/) (2021)
- [Webly Supervised Concept Expansion for General Purpose Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02317/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a detailed study of improving visual representations for vision language (VL) tasks and develops an improved object detection model to provide object-centric representations of images. Compared to the most widely used bottom-up and top-down model citeanderson2018bottom, the new model is bigger, better-designed for VL tasks, and pre-trained on much larger training corpora that combine multiple public annotated object detection datasets. Therefore, it can generate representations of a richer collection of visual objects and concepts. While previous VL research focuses mainly on improving the vision-language fusion model and leaves the object detection model improvement untouched, we show that visual features matter significantly in VL models. In our experiments we feed the visual features generated by the new object detection model into a Transformer-based VL fusion model oscar citeli2020oscar, and utilize an improved approach short to pre-train the VL model and fine-tune it on a wide range of downstream VL tasks. Our results show that the new visual features significantly improve the performance across all VL tasks, creating new state-of-the-art results on seven public benchmarks. We will release the new object detection model to public.