# SwAMP: Swapped Assignment of Multi-Modal Pairs for Cross-Modal Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.05814 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05814/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [Can Spatiotemporal 3D CNNs Retrace the History of 2D CNNs and ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09577/) (2017)
- [Self-labelling via simultaneous clustering and representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05371/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)
- [Deep Metric Learning via Lifted Structured Feature Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06452/) (2015)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [Multi-modal Transformer for Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10639/) (2020)
- [Multi-Similarity Loss with General Pair Weighting for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06627/) (2019)
- [VirTex: Learning Visual Representations from Textual Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06666/) (2020)
- [Pixel-BERT: Aligning Image Pixels with Text by Deep Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00849/) (2020)
- [Sampling Matters in Deep Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07567/) (2017)
- [Self-Supervised Learning by Cross-Modal Audio-Video Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12667/) (2019)
- [No Fuss Distance Metric Learning using Proxies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07464/) (2017)
- [Use What You Have: Video Retrieval Using Representations From Collaborative Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13487/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [RoME: Role-aware Mixture-of-Expert Transformer for Text-to-Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12845/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Contrastive Learning by Permuting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10314/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Modality Tags for Enhanced Cross-Modal Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01591/) (2025)
- [Generalizable single-cell perturbation response prediction using energy-guided flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02232/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We tackle the cross-modal retrieval problem, where learning is only supervised by relevant multi-modal pairs in the data. Although the contrastive learning is the most popular approach for this task, it makes potentially wrong assumption that the instances in different pairs are automatically irrelevant. To address the issue, we propose a novel loss function that is based on self-labeling of the unknown semantic classes. Specifically, we aim to predict class labels of the data instances in each modality, and assign those labels to the corresponding instances in the other modality (i.e., swapping the pseudo labels). With these swapped labels, we learn the data embedding for each modality using the supervised cross-entropy loss. This way, cross-modal instances from different pairs that are semantically related can be aligned to each other by the class predictor. We tested our approach on several real-world cross-modal retrieval problems, including text-based video retrieval, sketch-based image retrieval, and image-text retrieval. For all these tasks our method achieves significant performance improvement over the contrastive learning.