mCLIP: Multilingual CLIP via Cross-lingual Transfer

Guanhua Chen, Lu Hou, Yun Chen, Wenliang Dai, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Jia Pan, Wenping Wang


Abstract
Large-scale vision-language pretrained (VLP) models like CLIP have shown remarkable performance on various downstream cross-modal tasks. However, they are usually biased towards English due to the lack of sufficient non-English image-text pairs. Existing multilingual VLP methods often learn retrieval-inefficient single-stream models by translation-augmented non-English image-text pairs. In this paper, we introduce mCLIP, a retrieval-efficient dual-stream multilingual VLP model, trained by aligning the CLIP model and a Multilingual Text Encoder (MTE) through a novel Triangle Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation (TriKD) method. It is parameter-efficient as only two light projectors on the top of them are updated during distillation. Furthermore, to enhance the token- and sentence-level multilingual representation of the MTE, we propose to train it with machine translation and contrastive learning jointly before the TriKD to provide a better initialization. Empirical results show that mCLIP achieves new state-of-the-art performance for both zero-shot and finetuned multilingual image-text retrieval task.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.728
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13028–13043
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.728
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.728
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guanhua Chen, Lu Hou, Yun Chen, Wenliang Dai, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Jia Pan, and Wenping Wang. 2023. mCLIP: Multilingual CLIP via Cross-lingual Transfer. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13028–13043, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
mCLIP: Multilingual CLIP via Cross-lingual Transfer (Chen et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.728.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.728.mp4