Compositional Image-Text Matching and Retrieval by Grounding Entities

Abstract: Vision-language pretraining on large datasets of images-text pairs is one of the main building blocks of current Vision-LLMs. While with additional training, these models excel in various downstream tasks, including visual question answering, image captioning, and visual commonsense reasoning. However, a notable weakness of pretrained models like CLIP, is their inability to perform entity grounding and compositional image and text matching~\cite{Jiang2024ComCLIP, yang2023amc, Rajabi2023GroundedVSR, learninglocalizeCVPR24}. In this work we propose a novel learning-free zero-shot augmentation of CLIP embeddings that has favorable compositional properties. We compute separate embeddings of sub-images of object entities and relations that are localized by the state of the art open vocabulary detectors and dynamically adjust the baseline global image embedding. % The final embedding is obtained by computing a weighted combination of the sub-image embeddings. The resulting embedding is then utilized for similarity computation with text embedding, resulting in a average 1.5\% improvement in image-text matching accuracy on the Visual Genome and SVO Probes datasets~\cite{krishna2017visualgenome, svo}. Notably, the enhanced embeddings demonstrate superior retrieval performance, thus achieving significant gains on the Flickr30K and MS-COCO retrieval benchmarks~\cite{flickr30ke, mscoco}, improving the state-of-the-art Recall@1 by 12\% and 0.4\%, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/madhukarreddyvongala/GroundingCLIP.