{"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/towards-fast-and-accurate-image-text","title":"Towards Fast and Accurate Image-Text Retrieval with Self-Supervised Fine-Grained Alignment","arxiv_id":"2308.14009","date":"2023-08-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jiamin Zhuang","Jing Yu","Yang Ding","Xiangyan Qu","Yue Hu"],"abstract":"Image-text retrieval requires the system to bridge the heterogenous gap between vision and language for accurate retrieval while keeping the network lightweight-enough for efficient retrieval. Existing trade-off solutions mainly study from the view of incorporating cross-modal interactions with the independent-embedding framework or leveraging stronger pretrained encoders, which still demand time-consuming similarity measurement or heavyweight model structure in the retrieval stage. In this work, we propose an image-text alignment module SelfAlign on top of the independent-embedding framework, which improves the retrieval accuracy while maintains the retrieval efficiency without extra supervision. SelfAlign contains two collaborative sub-modules that force image-text alignment at both concept level and context level by self-supervised contrastive learning. It does not require cross-modal embedding interactions during training while maintaining independent image and text encoders during retrieval. With comparable time cost, SelfAlign consistently boosts the accuracy of state-of-the-art non-pretraining independent-embedding models respectively by 9.1%, 4.2% and 6.6% in terms of R@sum score on Flickr30K, MSCOCO 1K and MS-COCO 5K datasets. The retrieval accuracy also outperforms most existing interactive-embedding models with orders of magnitude decrease in retrieval time. The source code is available at: https://github.com/Zjamie813/SelfAlign.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14009v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.14009v1.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":"towards-fast-and-accurate-image-text","repo_url":"https://github.com/zjamie813/selfalign","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"contrastive-learning","task_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"task_slug":"image-text-retrieval","task_name":"Image-text Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"text-retrieval","task_name":"Text Retrieval"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2308.14009","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}