2022/06/17 by Xu Xiao, Chenfei Wu, Xu, Xiao +7 · 5 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2206.08657
openalex publication_date 2022/06/17 · openalex created_date 2022/06/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Vision-Language (VL) models with the Two-Tower architecture have dominated visual-language representation learning in recent years. Current VL models either use lightweight uni-modal encoders and learn to extract, align and fuse both modalities simultaneously in a deep cross-modal encoder, or feed the last-layer uni-modal representations from the deep pre-trained uni-modal encoders into the top cross-modal encoder. Both approaches potentially restrict vision-language representation learning and limit model performance. In this paper, we propose BridgeTower, which introduces multiple bridge layers that build a connection between the top layers of uni-modal encoders and each layer of the cross-modal encoder. This enables effective bottom-up cross-modal alignment and fusion between visual and textual representations of different semantic levels of pre-trained uni-modal encoders in the cross-modal encoder. Pre-trained with only 4M images, BridgeTower achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream vision-language tasks. In particular, on the VQAv2 test-std set, BridgeTower achieves an accuracy of 78.73%, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art model METER by 1.09% with the same pre-training data and almost negligible additional parameters and computational costs. Notably, when further scaling the model, BridgeTower achieves an accuracy of 81.15%, surpassing models that are pre-trained on orders-of-magnitude larger datasets. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/microsoft/BridgeTower.