More than just attention: Improving cross-modal attentions with contrastive constraints for image-text matching

Cross-modal attention mechanisms have been widely applied to the image-text matching task. They have achieved remarkable improvements thanks to their capability of learning fine-grained relevance across different modalities. However, the cross-modal attention models of existing methods could be sub-optimal and inaccurate because there is no direct supervision provided during the training process. In this work, we propose two novel training strategies, namely Contrastive Content Re-sourcing (CCR) and Contrastive Content Swapping (CCS) constraints, to address such limitations. These constraints supervise the training of cross-modal attention models in a contrastive learning manner without requiring explicit attention annotations. They are plug-in training strategies and can be generally integrated into existing cross-modal attention models. Additionally, we introduce three metrics, including Attention Precision, Recall, and F1-Score, to quantitatively measure the quality of learned attention models. We evaluate the proposed constraints by incorporating them into four state-of-the-art cross-modal attention-based image-text matching models. Experimental results on both Flickr30k and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate that integrating these constraints generally improves the model performance in terms of both retrieval performance and attention metrics.