Papers › VoLTA: Vision-Language Transformer with Weakly-Supervised Local-Feature Alignment

VoLTA: Vision-Language Transformer with Weakly-Supervised Local-Feature Alignment

9 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.04135archive 2025-07-28

Shraman Pramanick, Li Jing, Sayan Nag, Jiachen Zhu, Hardik Shah, Yann Lecun, Rama Chellappa

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) has recently proven highly effective for various uni- and multi-modal downstream applications. However, most existing end-to-end VLP methods use high-resolution image-text box data to perform well on fine-grained region-level tasks, such as object detection, segmentation, and referring expression comprehension. Unfortunately, such high-resolution images with accurate bounding box annotations are expensive to collect and use for supervision at scale. In this work, we propose VoLTA (Vision-Language Transformer with weakly-supervised local-feature Alignment), a new VLP paradigm that only utilizes image-caption data but achieves fine-grained region-level image understanding, eliminating the use of expensive box annotations. VoLTA adopts graph optimal transport-based weakly-supervised alignment on local image patches and text tokens to germinate an explicit, self-normalized, and interpretable low-level matching criterion. In addition, VoLTA pushes multi-modal fusion deep into the uni-modal backbones during pre-training and removes fusion-specific transformer layers, further reducing memory requirements. Extensive experiments on a wide range of vision- and vision-language downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of VoLTA on fine-grained applications without compromising the coarse-grained downstream performance, often outperforming methods using significantly more caption and box annotations.

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ShramanPramanick/VoLTA officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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1ran · honoured contract
2ran · our draft was wrong
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cost_matrix_torch ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/OT_torch_.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · d79fd2ac61421292 · report
create_position_ids_from_input_ids ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/roberta.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · da1c54dffed5d60c · report
window_partition ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/swin_transformer.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 993ae96666b00cb5 · report
window_reverse ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/swin_transformer.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 265c72d3ccc64544 · report
IPOT_distance_torch ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/OT_torch_.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · b1e24c9598daad69 · report
IPOT_torch ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/OT_torch_.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 674f9140f14e54a6 · report
apply_chunking_to_forward ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/roberta.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 7a80cf522c830aeb · report
get_id_list_coco2014 ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/get_id_list.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · c98d2b87e8adc438 · report
get_id_list_separate ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/get_id_list.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 33e998e445a0eee0 · report
load_state_dict ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/swin_helpers.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · bc3a13e8155e8140 · report
resume_checkpoint ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/swin_helpers.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 102b75f3481035d1 · report
swin_adapt_position_encoding ShramanPramanick/VoLTA/Pre-training/swin_helpers.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 3c0bf9aa4752cff5 · report
create_positive_map identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · honoured contract licence of this copy not recorded · 525b77c721203779 · report
create_positive_map_label_to_token_from_positive_map identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted licence of this copy not recorded · ea2c188d68558611 · report

Tasks

Object DetectionReferring ExpressionReferring Expression Comprehensionobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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