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Modeling Caption Diversity in Contrastive Vision-Language Pretraining (2405.00740v3)

Published 30 Apr 2024 in cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, and cs.LG
Modeling Caption Diversity in Contrastive Vision-Language Pretraining

Abstract: There are a thousand ways to caption an image. Contrastive Language Pretraining (CLIP) on the other hand, works by mapping an image and its caption to a single vector -- limiting how well CLIP-like models can represent the diverse ways to describe an image. In this work, we introduce Llip, Latent Language Image Pretraining, which models the diversity of captions that could match an image. Llip's vision encoder outputs a set of visual features that are mixed into a final representation by conditioning on information derived from the text. We show that Llip outperforms non-contextualized baselines like CLIP and SigLIP on a variety of tasks even with large-scale encoders. Llip improves zero-shot classification by an average of 2.9% zero-shot classification benchmarks with a ViT-G/14 encoder. Specifically, Llip attains a zero-shot top-1 accuracy of 83.5% on ImageNet outperforming a similarly sized CLIP by 1.4%. We also demonstrate improvement on zero-shot retrieval on MS-COCO by 6.0%. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the components introduced by the method and demonstrate that Llip leads to richer visual representations.

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Understanding Llip: Enhancing Visual LLMs by Contextualizing Visual Features

Introduction to Llip

In the universe of Visual Language Pre-training (VLP), the standard has largely been set by models like CLIP, which learn visual representations highly aligned with associated text captions, leveraging large-scale datasets. However, the traditional approach of models like CLIP has limitations due to its treatment of caption diversity: typically, every description of an image must map directly onto a singular, consolidated image representation. This overlooks the various facets an image can represent when described in different textual contexts.

To tackle these challenges, the new model introduced, Latent Language Image Pre-training (Llip), proposes a method where the image representation is dependent on the text caption, allowing diverse descriptions to influence the encoded feature more flexibly. It's a step towards embracing the multiplicity of narrative angles one can derive from a single visual content.

How Llip Works

Architecture Deep Dive

Llip enhances the traditional VLP framework by allowing the visual encoder to output not just one, but multiple "mixture" tokens - think of these as potential visual interpretations. These tokens are then selectively combined based on the text caption provided. This approach allows for a dynamic representation of an image aligned closer with the specific textual description it is paired with, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all representation.

The mechanics of this process involve:

  • Visual Encoder Adjustment: Utilizes multiple learnable tokens (mixture tokens) that represent different aspects of the image.
  • Contextualization Via Text: A cross-attention mechanism adjusts the contribution of each visual token based on the text, producing a contextually relevant visual representation.
  • Contrastive Learning Objective: Similar to CLIP, Llip employs a contrastive objective but with a crucial distinction. It focuses on matching these contextually-adjusted visual features with their corresponding text features across positive (matching text-image pairs) and negative examples.

Empirical Validation

The effectiveness of Llip is underscored by its performance on several zero-shot benchmarks like ImageNet and COCO, where it consistently outperforms CLIP-based methods across various model sizes. Notably, a Vision Transformer variant equipped with Llip (ViT-G/14) achieved an 83.5% Top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet zero-shot task, which is a clear improvement over the same model architecture trained with CLIP.

Practical Implications and Future of AI

Theoretical Implications

This innovative way of capturing visual representations suggests a shift in how we understand vision-language alignment. Instead of striving for a singular, invariant representation, allowing varying "interpretations" of visual data might be more applicable for real-world scenarios where multiple descriptions can be equally valid.

Practical Applications

For developers and researchers, Llip provides a framework to develop more nuanced visual recognition systems that better understand context, which can be particularly useful in applications like automated tagging, content recommendation, or interactive AI where the nuances of language significantly impact system output.

Anticipated Future Advancements

As the dataset diversity and quality continue to improve, methods like Llip are expected to significantly benefit from such enhancements given their reliance on rich and varied captioning to learn flexible representations. Additionally, exploring the integration of such models with other modalities (e.g., audio, sensory data) could pave the way for even more contextual and robust multimedia AI systems.

Conclusion

Llip represents an exciting development in the sphere of vision-LLMs, introducing the concept of contextual visual representations. It challenges the status quo set by earlier models and provides a strong foundation for future explorations into more context-aware AI systems. The model not only advances theoretical insights into how machines can understand images but also broadens the horizon for practical AI applications across various domains.

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Authors (7)
  1. Samuel Lavoie (9 papers)
  2. Polina Kirichenko (15 papers)
  3. Mark Ibrahim (36 papers)
  4. Mahmoud Assran (20 papers)
  5. Aaron Courville (201 papers)
  6. Nicolas Ballas (49 papers)
  7. Andrew Gordon Wilson (133 papers)
Citations (8)
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