Papers › DeVLBert: Learning Deconfounded Visio-Linguistic Representations

DeVLBert: Learning Deconfounded Visio-Linguistic Representations

16 Aug 2020arXiv:2008.06884archive 2025-07-28

Shengyu Zhang, Tan Jiang, Tan Wang, Kun Kuang, Zhou Zhao, Jianke Zhu, Jin Yu, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu

In this paper, we propose to investigate the problem of out-of-domain visio-linguistic pretraining, where the pretraining data distribution differs from that of downstream data on which the pretrained model will be fine-tuned. Existing methods for this problem are purely likelihood-based, leading to the spurious correlations and hurt the generalization ability when transferred to out-of-domain downstream tasks. By spurious correlation, we mean that the conditional probability of one token (object or word) given another one can be high (due to the dataset biases) without robust (causal) relationships between them. To mitigate such dataset biases, we propose a Deconfounded Visio-Linguistic Bert framework, abbreviated as DeVLBert, to perform intervention-based learning. We borrow the idea of the backdoor adjustment from the research field of causality and propose several neural-network based architectures for Bert-style out-of-domain pretraining. The quantitative results on three downstream tasks, Image Retrieval (IR), Zero-shot IR, and Visual Question Answering, show the effectiveness of DeVLBert by boosting generalization ability.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

shengyuzhang/DeVLBert officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Image RetrievalQuestion AnsweringRetrievalVisual Question AnsweringVisual Question Answering (VQA)

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections