# LightningDOT: Pre-training Visual-Semantic Embeddings for Real-Time Image-Text Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.08784 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08784/

## Key facts

- Cited by 44 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [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)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00808/) (2020)
- [Patient Knowledge Distillation for BERT Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09355/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [VIOLET : End-to-End Video-Language Transformers with Masked Visual-token Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12681/) (2021)
- [Cross-Modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12501/) (2023)
- [Wukong: A 100 Million Large-scale Chinese Cross-modal Pre-training Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06767/) (2022)
- [AdvCLIP: Downstream-agnostic Adversarial Examples in Multimodal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07026/) (2023)
- [Adversarial VQA: A New Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of VQA Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00245/) (2021)
- [Text-Based Person Search with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10807/) (2021)
- [Vision-and-Language Pretrained Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07356/) (2022)
- [PLIP: Language-Image Pre-training for Person Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08386/) (2023)
- [UFO: A UniFied TransfOrmer for Vision-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10023/) (2021)
- [ProposalCLIP: Unsupervised Open-Category Object Proposal Generation via Exploiting CLIP Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06696/) (2022)
- [Chat-Driven Text Generation and Interaction for Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12662/) (2025)
- [COTS: Collaborative Two-Stream Vision-Language Pre-Training Model for Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07441/) (2022)
- [FashionViL: Fashion-Focused Vision-and-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08150/) (2022)
- [Reason-before-Retrieve: One-Stage Reflective Chain-of-Thoughts for Training-Free Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11077/) (2024)
- [Understanding Chinese Video and Language via Contrastive Multimodal Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09411/) (2021)
- [Distilled Dual-Encoder Model for Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08723/) (2021)
- [GSRFormer: Grounded Situation Recognition Transformer with Alternate Semantic Attention Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08965/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Interactive Image Retrieval With Query Rewriting Using Large Language Models and Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18746/) (2024)
- [MVPTR: Multi-Level Semantic Alignment for Vision-Language Pre-Training via Multi-Stage Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12596/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Uncertainty Learning with Noisy Correspondence for Text-Based Person Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06566/) (2025)
- [Efficient Token-Guided Image-Text Retrieval with Consistent Multimodal Contrastive Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08789/) (2023)
- [LoopITR: Combining Dual and Cross Encoder Architectures for Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05465/) (2022)
- [AliMe MKG: A Multi-modal Knowledge Graph for Live-streaming E-commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07411/) (2021)
- [ERNIE-ViL 2.0: Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Image-Text Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15270/) (2022)
- [Towards Fast and Accurate Image-Text Retrieval with Self-Supervised Fine-Grained Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14009/) (2023)
- [Correlation Information Bottleneck: Towards Adapting Pretrained Multimodal Models for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06954/) (2022)
- [VLDeformer: Vision-Language Decomposed Transformer for Fast Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11338/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Empirical Study of Vision-Language Pre-trained Model for Supervised Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02772/) (2022)
- [HiVLP: Hierarchical Vision-Language Pre-Training for Fast Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12105/) (2022)
- [ContextCLIP: Contextual Alignment of Image-Text pairs on CLIP visual representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07122/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal pre-training has propelled great advancement in vision-and-language research. These large-scale pre-trained models, although successful, fatefully suffer from slow inference speed due to enormous computation cost mainly from cross-modal attention in Transformer architecture. When applied to real-life applications, such latency and computation demand severely deter the practical use of pre-trained models. In this paper, we study Image-text retrieval (ITR), the most mature scenario of V+L application, which has been widely studied even prior to the emergence of recent pre-trained models. We propose a simple yet highly effective approach, LightningDOT that accelerates the inference time of ITR by thousands of times, without sacrificing accuracy. LightningDOT removes the time-consuming cross-modal attention by pre-training on three novel learning objectives, extracting feature indexes offline, and employing instant dot-product matching with further re-ranking, which significantly speeds up retrieval process. In fact, LightningDOT achieves new state of the art across multiple ITR benchmarks such as Flickr30k, COCO and Multi30K, outperforming existing pre-trained models that consume 1000x magnitude of computational hours. Code and pre-training checkpoints are available at https://github.com/intersun/LightningDOT.