E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning

Haiyang Xu, Ming Yan, Chenliang Li, Bin Bi, Songfang Huang, Wenming Xiao, Fei Huang


Abstract
Vision-language pre-training (VLP) on large-scale image-text pairs has achieved huge success for the cross-modal downstream tasks. The most existing pre-training methods mainly adopt a two-step training procedure, which firstly employs a pre-trained object detector to extract region-based visual features, then concatenates the image representation and text embedding as the input of Transformer to train. However, these methods face problems of using task-specific visual representation of the specific object detector for generic cross-modal understanding, and the computation inefficiency of two-stage pipeline. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end vision-language pre-trained model for both V+L understanding and generation, namely E2E-VLP, where we build a unified Transformer framework to jointly learn visual representation, and semantic alignments between image and text. We incorporate the tasks of object detection and image captioning into pre-training with a unified Transformer encoder-decoder architecture for enhancing visual learning. An extensive set of experiments have been conducted on well-established vision-language downstream tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of this novel VLP paradigm.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.42
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:
503–513
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.42
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.42
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haiyang Xu, Ming Yan, Chenliang Li, Bin Bi, Songfang Huang, Wenming Xiao, and Fei Huang. 2021. E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning. 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 503–513, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning (Xu et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.42.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.42.mp4
Data
Flickr30kMS COCOVisual GenomeVisual Question Answering