# Image-Text Retrieval with Binary and Continuous Label Supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11319 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11319/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [Deep Metric Learning via Lifted Structured Feature Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06452/) (2015)
- [Deep metric learning using Triplet network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6622/) (2014)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [12-in-1: Multi-Task Vision and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02315/) (2019)
- [Visual Semantic Reasoning for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02701/) (2019)
- [Learning the Best Pooling Strategy for Visual Semantic Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04305/) (2020)
- [Similarity Reasoning and Filtration for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01368/) (2021)
- [IMRAM: Iterative Matching with Recurrent Attention Memory for Cross-Modal Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03772/) (2020)
- [Smooth-AP: Smoothing the Path Towards Large-Scale Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12163/) (2020)
- [Crisscrossed Captions: Extended Intramodal and Intermodal Semantic Similarity Judgments for MS-COCO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.15020/) (2020)
- [On Semantic Similarity in Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10095/) (2021)
- [ECCV Caption: Correcting False Negatives by Collecting Machine-and-Human-verified Image-Caption Associations for MS-COCO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03359/) (2022)
- [Universal Weighting Metric Learning for Cross-Modal Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03403/) (2020)
- [ViSTA: Vision and Scene Text Aggregation for Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16778/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Offline Quintuplet Loss for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03669/) (2020)
- [Ladder Loss for Coherent Visual-Semantic Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07528/) (2019)
- [Is An Image Worth Five Sentences? A New Look into Semantics for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02623/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Cross-Modal and Uni-Modal Soft-Label Alignment for Image-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05261/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most image-text retrieval work adopts binary labels indicating whether a pair of image and text matches or not. Such a binary indicator covers only a limited subset of image-text semantic relations, which is insufficient to represent relevance degrees between images and texts described by continuous labels such as image captions. The visual-semantic embedding space obtained by learning binary labels is incoherent and cannot fully characterize the relevance degrees. In addition to the use of binary labels, this paper further incorporates continuous pseudo labels (generally approximated by text similarity between captions) to indicate the relevance degrees. To learn a coherent embedding space, we propose an image-text retrieval framework with Binary and Continuous Label Supervision (BCLS), where binary labels are used to guide the retrieval model to learn limited binary correlations, and continuous labels are complementary to the learning of image-text semantic relations. For the learning of binary labels, we improve the common Triplet ranking loss with Soft Negative mining (Triplet-SN) to improve convergence. For the learning of continuous labels, we design Kendall ranking loss inspired by Kendall rank correlation coefficient (Kendall), which improves the correlation between the similarity scores predicted by the retrieval model and the continuous labels. To mitigate the noise introduced by the continuous pseudo labels, we further design Sliding Window sampling and Hard Sample mining strategy (SW-HS) to alleviate the impact of noise and reduce the complexity of our framework to the same order of magnitude as the triplet ranking loss. Extensive experiments on two image-text retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that our method can improve the performance of state-of-the-art image-text retrieval models.