Conditional Image-Text Embedding Networks

Bryan A. Plummer, Paige Kordas, M. Hadi Kiapour, Shuai Zheng, Robinson Piramuthu, Svetlana Lazebnik; The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 249-264

This paper presents an approach for grounding phrases in images which jointly learns multiple text-conditioned embeddings in a single end-to-end model. In order to differentiate text phrases into semantically distinct subspaces, we propose a concept weight branch that automatically assigns phrases to embeddings, whereas prior works predefine such assignments. Our proposed solution simplifies the representation requirements for individual embeddings and allows the underrepresented concepts to take advantage of the shared representations before feeding them into concept-specific layers. Comprehensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our approach across three phrase grounding datasets, Flickr30K Entities, ReferIt Game, and Visual Genome, where we obtain a (resp.) 4%, 3%, and 4% improvement in grounding performance over a strong region-phrase embedding baseline.