Multi-Task Visual Semantic Embedding Network for Image-Text Retrieval

Image-text retrieval aims to capture the semantic correspondence between images and texts, which serves as a foundation and crucial component in multi-modal recommendations, search systems, and online shopping. Existing mainstream methods primarily focus on modeling the association of image-text pairs while neglecting the advantageous impact of multi-task learning on image-text retrieval. To this end, a multi-task visual semantic embedding network (MVSEN) is proposed for image-text retrieval. Specifically, we design two auxiliary tasks, including text-text matching and multi-label classification, for semantic constraints to improve the generalization and robustness of visual semantic embedding from a training perspective. Besides, we present an intra- and inter-modality interaction scheme to learn discriminative visual and textual feature representations by facilitating information flow within and between modalities. Subsequently, we utilize multi-layer graph convolutional networks in a cascading manner to infer the correlation of image-text pairs. Experimental results show that MVSEN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two publicly available datasets, Flickr30K and MSCO-CO, with rSum improvements of 8.2% and 3.0%, respectively.