TVDIM: Enhancing Image Self-Supervised Pretraining via Noisy Text Data

Abstract: Among ubiquitous multimodal data in the real world, text is the modality generated by human, while image reflects the physical world honestly. In a visual understanding application, machines are expected to understand images like human. Inspired by this, we propose a novel self-supervised learning method, named Text-enhanced Visual Deep InfoMax (TVDIM), to learn better visual representations by fully utilizing the naturally-existing multimodal data. Our core idea of self-supervised learning is to maximize the mutual information between features extracted from multiple views of a shared context to a rational degree. Different from previous methods which only consider multiple views from a single modality, our work produces multiple views from different modalities, and jointly optimizes the mutual information for features pairs of intra-modality and inter-modality. Considering the information gap between inter-modality features pairs from data noise, we adopt a \emph{ranking-based} contrastive learning to optimize the mutual information. During evaluation, we directly use the pre-trained visual representations to complete various image classification tasks. Experimental results show that, TVDIM significantly outperforms previous visual self-supervised methods when processing the same set of images.