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 Resourcing (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.