ContextBLIP: Doubly Contextual Alignment for Contrastive Image Retrieval from Linguistically Complex Descriptions

Honglin Lin, Siyu Li, Guoshun Nan, Chaoyue Tang, Xueting Wang, Jingxin Xu, Rong Yankai, Zhouzhili Zhouzhili, Yutong Gao, Qimei Cui, Xiaofeng Tao


Abstract
Image retrieval from contextual descriptions (IRCD) aims to identify an image within a set of minimally contrastive candidates based on linguistically complex text. Despite the success of VLMs, they still significantly lag behind human performance in IRCD. The main challenges lie in aligning key contextual cues in two modalities, where these subtle cues are concealed in tiny areas of multiple contrastive images and within the complex linguistics of textual descriptions. This motivates us to propose ContextBLIP, a simple yet effective method that relies on a doubly contextual alignment scheme for challenging IRCD. Specifically, 1) our model comprises a multi-scale adapter, a matching loss, and a text-guided masking loss. The adapter learns to capture fine-grained visual cues. The two losses enable iterative supervision for the adapter, gradually highlighting the focal patches of a single image to the key textual cues. We term such a way as intra-contextual alignment. 2) Then, ContextBLIP further employs an inter-context encoder to learn dependencies among candidates, facilitating alignment between the text to multiple images. We term this step as inter-contextual alignment. Consequently, the nuanced cues concealed in each modality can be effectively aligned. Experiments on two benchmarks show the superiority of our method. We observe that ContextBLIP can yield comparable results with GPT-4V, despite involving about 7,500 times fewer parameters.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.961
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
16240–16258
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.961
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Cite (ACL):
Honglin Lin, Siyu Li, Guoshun Nan, Chaoyue Tang, Xueting Wang, Jingxin Xu, Rong Yankai, Zhouzhili Zhouzhili, Yutong Gao, Qimei Cui, and Xiaofeng Tao. 2024. ContextBLIP: Doubly Contextual Alignment for Contrastive Image Retrieval from Linguistically Complex Descriptions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 16240–16258, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ContextBLIP: Doubly Contextual Alignment for Contrastive Image Retrieval from Linguistically Complex Descriptions (Lin et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.961.pdf