VisualSparta: An Embarrassingly Simple Approach to Large-scale Text-to-Image Search with Weighted Bag-of-words

Xiaopeng Lu, Tiancheng Zhao, Kyusong Lee


Abstract
Text-to-image retrieval is an essential task in cross-modal information retrieval, i.e., retrieving relevant images from a large and unlabelled dataset given textual queries. In this paper, we propose VisualSparta, a novel (Visual-text Sparse Transformer Matching) model that shows significant improvement in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. VisualSparta is capable of outperforming previous state-of-the-art scalable methods in MSCOCO and Flickr30K. We also show that it achieves substantial retrieving speed advantages, i.e., for a 1 million image index, VisualSparta using CPU gets ~391X speedup compared to CPU vector search and ~5.4X speedup compared to vector search with GPU acceleration. Experiments show that this speed advantage even gets bigger for larger datasets because VisualSparta can be efficiently implemented as an inverted index. To the best of our knowledge, VisualSparta is the first transformer-based text-to-image retrieval model that can achieve real-time searching for large-scale datasets, with significant accuracy improvement compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.389
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5020–5029
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.389
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.389
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaopeng Lu, Tiancheng Zhao, and Kyusong Lee. 2021. VisualSparta: An Embarrassingly Simple Approach to Large-scale Text-to-Image Search with Weighted Bag-of-words. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5020–5029, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VisualSparta: An Embarrassingly Simple Approach to Large-scale Text-to-Image Search with Weighted Bag-of-words (Lu et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.389.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.389.mp4
Data
Flickr30kMS COCO