2024/04/28 by Haiwen Diao, Diao, Haiwen, Ying Zhang +7
Computer Science · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Image Retrieval and Classification Techniques #Multimedia (cs.MM)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.18114
openalex publication_date 2024/04/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Image-text matching remains a challenging task due to heterogeneous semantic diversity across modalities and insufficient distance separability within triplets. Different from previous approaches focusing on enhancing multi-modal representations or exploiting cross-modal correspondence for more accurate retrieval, in this paper we aim to leverage the knowledge transfer between peer branches in a boosting manner to seek a more powerful matching model. Specifically, we propose a brand-new Deep Boosting Learning (DBL) algorithm, where an anchor branch is first trained to provide insights into the data properties, with a target branch gaining more advanced knowledge to develop optimal features and distance metrics. Concretely, an anchor branch initially learns the absolute or relative distance between positive and negative pairs, providing a foundational understanding of the particular network and data distribution. Building upon this knowledge, a target branch is concurrently tasked with more adaptive margin constraints to further enlarge the relative distance between matched and unmatched samples. Extensive experiments validate that our DBL can achieve impressive and consistent improvements based on various recent state-of-the-art models in the image-text matching field, and outperform related popular cooperative strategies, e.g., Conventional Distillation, Mutual Learning, and Contrastive Learning. Beyond the above, we confirm that DBL can be seamlessly integrated into their training scenarios and achieve superior performance under the same computational costs, demonstrating the flexibility and broad applicability of our proposed method. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/DBL.