Papers › UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning

UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning

31 Dec 2020ACL 2021 5arXiv:2012.15409archive 2025-07-28

Wei Li, Can Gao, guocheng niu, Xinyan Xiao, Hao liu, Jiachen Liu, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang

Existed pre-training methods either focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal tasks, and cannot effectively adapt to each other. They can only utilize single-modal data (i.e. text or image) or limited multi-modal data (i.e. image-text pairs). In this work, we propose a unified-modal pre-training architecture, namely UNIMO, which can effectively adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. Large scale of free text corpus and image collections can be utilized to improve the capability of visual and textual understanding, and cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL) is leveraged to align the textual and visual information into a unified semantic space over a corpus of image-text pairs. As the non-paired single-modal data is very rich, our model can utilize much larger scale of data to learn more generalizable representations. Moreover, the textual knowledge and visual knowledge can enhance each other in the unified semantic space. The experimental results show that UNIMO significantly improves the performance of several single-modal and multi-modal downstream tasks. Our code and pre-trained models are public at the UNIMO project page https://unimo-ptm.github.io/

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Code

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Tasks

Contrastive LearningCross-Modal RetrievalImage Captioning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Captioning COCO (Common Objects in Context) UNIMO-large BLEU-4 39.6 #4 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning COCO (Common Objects in Context) UNIMO-large CIDEr 127.7 #4 of 17 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Introduced by this paper: CMCL, UNIMO

CMCLContrastive LearningUNIMO

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