Novel Clustering Aggregation and Multi-grained Alignment for Image-Text Matching

Abstract

As a challenging multi-modal task, image-text matching continues to be an attractive topic of research. The essence of this task lies in narrowing down the semantic disparity between vision and language to align them better. Existing works have either focused on coarse-grained alignment between global images and texts or fine-grained alignment between salient regions and words. However, they do not distinguish between considering related and redundant pairs (i.e., regions with no matching words or pairs with low relevance). We thereby propose a Novel Clustering Aggregation and multi-grained Alignment network (NCAA), which utilizes cross-modal contextual clustering to group regions based on semantic information consistent with the text content. Specifically, we leverage textual fragments as clustering centers, similarity between regions and fragments as propagation medium and delicately devise two mask mechanisms for simultaneous and distinguishable consideration of both related and redundant pairs. Two alignment modules of different granularities are also introduced to achieve the multi-grained alignment. By incorporating both global and local similarity into the training and inference phases, our model attains further enhancements. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, Flickr30K and MSCOCO, demonstrating the efficacy of our framework.