Learning Semantic Relationship among Instances for Image-Text Matching

Image-text matching, a bridge connecting image and language, is an important task, which generally learns a holistic cross-modal embedding to achieve a high-quality semantic alignment between the two modalities. However, previous studies only focus on capturing fragment-level relation within a sample from a particular modality, e.g., salient regions in an image or text words in a sentence, where they usually pay less attention to capturing instance-level interactions among samples and modalities, e.g., multiple images and texts. In this paper, we argue that sample relations could help learn subtle differences for hard negative instances, and thus transfer shared knowledge for infrequent samples should be promising in obtaining better holistic embeddings. Therefore, we propose a novel hierarchical relation modeling framework (HREM), which explicitly capture both fragment- and instance-level relations to learn discriminative and robust cross-modal embeddings. Extensive experiments on Flickr30K and MS-COCO show our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art ones by 4%-10% in terms of rSum. Our code is available at https://github.com/CrossmodalGroup/HREM.