# Dynamic Visual Semantic Sub-Embeddings and Fast Re-Ranking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08154 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08154/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00932/) (2018)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [Multi-Similarity Loss with General Pair Weighting for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06627/) (2019)
- [Re-ranking Person Re-identification with k-reciprocal Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08398/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Learning -- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04394/) (2017)
- [Unifying Visual-Semantic Embeddings with Multimodal Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.2539/) (2014)
- [Visual Semantic Reasoning for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02701/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Embeddings for Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05068/) (2021)
- [Dual-Path Convolutional Image-Text Embeddings with Instance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05535/) (2017)
- [Learning the Best Pooling Strategy for Visual Semantic Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04305/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [From Generator to Embedder: Harnessing Innate Abilities of Multimodal LLMs via Building Zero-Shot Discriminative Embedding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00955/) (2025)
- [Ambiguity-Aware and High-Order Relation Learning for Multi-Grained Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09256/) (2025)
- [Variational Adapter for Cross-modal Similarity Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30968/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The core of cross-modal matching is to accurately measure the similarity between different modalities in a unified representation space. However, compared to textual descriptions of a certain perspective, the visual modality has more semantic variations. So, images are usually associated with multiple textual captions in databases. Although popular symmetric embedding methods have explored numerous modal interaction approaches, they often learn toward increasing the average expression probability of multiple semantic variations within image embeddings. Consequently, information entropy in embeddings is increased, resulting in redundancy and decreased accuracy. In this work, we propose a Dynamic Visual Semantic Sub-Embeddings framework (DVSE) to reduce the information entropy. Specifically, we obtain a set of heterogeneous visual sub-embeddings through dynamic orthogonal constraint loss. To encourage the generated candidate embeddings to capture various semantic variations, we construct a mixed distribution and employ a variance-aware weighting loss to assign different weights to the optimization process. In addition, we develop a Fast Re-ranking strategy (FR) to efficiently evaluate the retrieval results and enhance the performance. We compare the performance with existing set-based method using four image feature encoders and two text feature encoders on three benchmark datasets: MSCOCO, Flickr30K and CUB Captions. We also show the role of different components by ablation studies and perform a sensitivity analysis of the hyperparameters. The qualitative analysis of visualized bidirectional retrieval and attention maps further demonstrates the ability of our method to encode semantic variations.