{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/rethinking-benchmarks-for-cross-modal-image","title":"Rethinking Benchmarks for Cross-modal Image-text Retrieval","arxiv_id":"2304.10824","date":"2023-04-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Weijing Chen","Linli Yao","Qin Jin"],"abstract":"Image-text retrieval, as a fundamental and important branch of information retrieval, has attracted extensive research attentions. The main challenge of this task is cross-modal semantic understanding and matching. Some recent works focus more on fine-grained cross-modal semantic matching. With the prevalence of large scale multimodal pretraining models, several state-of-the-art models (e.g. X-VLM) have achieved near-perfect performance on widely-used image-text retrieval benchmarks, i.e. MSCOCO-Test-5K and Flickr30K-Test-1K. In this paper, we review the two common benchmarks and observe that they are insufficient to assess the true capability of models on fine-grained cross-modal semantic matching. The reason is that a large amount of images and texts in the benchmarks are coarse-grained. Based on the observation, we renovate the coarse-grained images and texts in the old benchmarks and establish the improved benchmarks called MSCOCO-FG and Flickr30K-FG. Specifically, on the image side, we enlarge the original image pool by adopting more similar images. On the text side, we propose a novel semi-automatic renovation approach to refine coarse-grained sentences into finer-grained ones with little human effort. Furthermore, we evaluate representative image-text retrieval models on our new benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We also analyze the capability of models on fine-grained semantic comprehension through extensive experiments. The results show that even the state-of-the-art models have much room for improvement in fine-grained semantic understanding, especially in distinguishing attributes of close objects in images. Our code and improved benchmark datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/cwj1412/MSCOCO-Flikcr30K_FG, which we hope will inspire further in-depth research on cross-modal retrieval.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10824v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.10824v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"rethinking-benchmarks-for-cross-modal-image","repo_url":"https://github.com/cwj1412/mscoco-flikcr30k_fg","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"cross-modal-retrieval","task_name":"Cross-Modal Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"image-text-retrieval","task_name":"Image-text Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"image-to-text-retrieval","task_name":"Image-to-Text Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"information-retrieval","task_name":"Information Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"text-retrieval","task_name":"Text Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}