ZRIGF: An Innovative Multimodal Framework for Zero-Resource Image-Grounded Dialogue Generation

Image-grounded dialogue systems benefit greatly from integrating visual information, resulting in high-quality response generation. However, current models struggle to effectively utilize such information in zero-resource scenarios, mainly due to the disparity between image and text modalities. To overcome this challenge, we propose an innovative multimodal framework, called ZRIGF, which assimilates image-grounded information for dialogue generation in zero-resource situations. ZRIGF implements a two-stage learning strategy, comprising contrastive pre-training and generative pre-training. Contrastive pre-training includes a text-image matching module that maps images and texts into a unified encoded vector space, along with a text-assisted masked image modeling module that preserves pre-training visual features and fosters further multimodal feature alignment. Generative pre-training employs a multimodal fusion module and an information transfer module to produce insightful responses based on harmonized multimodal representations. Comprehensive experiments conducted on both text-based and image-grounded dialogue datasets demonstrate ZRIGF's efficacy in generating contextually pertinent and informative responses. Furthermore, we adopt a fully zero-resource scenario in the image-grounded dialogue dataset to demonstrate our framework's robust generalization capabilities in novel domains. The code is available at https://github.com/zhangbo-nlp/ZRIGF.