EntityCLIP: Entity-Centric Image-Text Matching via Multimodal Attentive Contrastive Learning

Recent advancements in image-text matching have been notable, yet prevailing models predominantly cater to broad queries and struggle with accommodating fine-grained query intention. In this paper, we work towards the Entity-centric Image-Text Matching (EITM), a task that the text and image involve specific entity-related information. The challenge of this task mainly lies in the larger semantic gap in entity association modeling, comparing with the general image-text matching problem.To narrow the huge semantic gap between the entity-centric text and the images, we take the fundamental CLIP as the backbone and devise a multimodal attentive contrastive learning framework to tam CLIP to adapt EITM problem, developing a model named EntityCLIP. The key of our multimodal attentive contrastive learning is to generate interpretive explanation text using Large Language Models (LLMs) as the bridge clues. In specific, we proceed by extracting explanatory text from off-the-shelf LLMs. This explanation text, coupled with the image and text, is then input into our specially crafted Multimodal Attentive Experts (MMAE) module, which effectively integrates explanation texts to narrow the gap of the entity-related text and image in a shared semantic space. Building on the enriched features derived from MMAE, we further design an effective Gated Integrative Image-text Matching (GI-ITM) strategy. The GI-ITM employs an adaptive gating mechanism to aggregate MMAE's features, subsequently applying image-text matching constraints to steer the alignment between the text and the image. Extensive experiments are conducted on three social media news benchmarks including N24News, VisualNews, and GoodNews, the results shows that our method surpasses the competition methods with a clear margin.