Multi-Task Visual Semantic Embedding Network for Image-Text Retrieval

Image-text retrieval aims to capture the semantic correspondence between images and texts,which serves as a foundation and crucial component in multi-modal recommendations,search systems,and online shopping.Existing mainstream methods primarily focus on modeling the association of image-text pairs while neglecting the advantageous impact of multi-task learning on image-text retrieval.To this end,a multi-task visual semantic embedding network(MVSEN)is proposed for image-text retrieval.Specifically,we design two auxiliary tasks,including text-text matching and multi-label classification,for semantic constraints to improve the generalization and robustness of visual semantic embedding from a training perspective.Besides,we present an intra-and inter-modality interaction scheme to learn discriminative visual and textual feature representations by facilitating information flow within and between modalities.Subsequently,we utilize multi-layer graph convolutional networks in a cascading manner to infer the correlation of image-text pairs.Experimental results show that MVSEN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two publicly available datasets,Flickr30K and MSCOCO,with rSum improvements of 8.2%and 3.0%,respectively.