Balance Act: Mitigating Hubness in Cross-Modal Retrieval with Query and Gallery Banks

Yimu Wang, Xiangru Jian, Bo Xue


Abstract
In this work, we present a post-processing solution to address the hubness problem in cross-modal retrieval, a phenomenon where a small number of gallery data points are frequently retrieved, resulting in a decline in retrieval performance. We first theoretically demonstrate the necessity of incorporating both the gallery and query data for addressing hubness as hubs always exhibit high similarity with gallery and query data. Second, building on our theoretical results, we propose a novel framework, Dual Bank Normalization (DBNorm). While previous work has attempted to alleviate hubness by only utilizing the query samples, DBNorm leverages two banks constructed from the query and gallery samples to reduce the occurrence of hubs during inference. Next, to complement DBNorm, we introduce two novel methods, dual inverted softmax and dual dynamic inverted softmax, for normalizing similarity based on the two banks. Specifically, our proposed methods reduce the similarity between hubs and queries while improving the similarity between non-hubs and queries. Finally, we present extensive experimental results on diverse language-grounded benchmarks, including text-image, text-video, and text-audio, demonstrating the superior performance of our approaches compared to previous methods in addressing hubness and boosting retrieval performance.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.652
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10542–10567
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.652
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.652
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yimu Wang, Xiangru Jian, and Bo Xue. 2023. Balance Act: Mitigating Hubness in Cross-Modal Retrieval with Query and Gallery Banks. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10542–10567, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Balance Act: Mitigating Hubness in Cross-Modal Retrieval with Query and Gallery Banks (Wang et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.652.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.652.mp4