Image-Text Retrieval via Contrastive Learning with Auxiliary Generative Features and Support-set Regularization

In this paper, we bridge the heterogeneity gap between different modalities and improve image-text retrieval by taking advantage of auxiliary image-to-text and text-to-image generative features with contrastive learning. Concretely, contrastive learning is devised to narrow the distance between the aligned image-text pairs and push apart the distance between the unaligned pairs from both inter- and intra-modality perspectives with the help of cross-modal retrieval features and auxiliary generative features. In addition, we devise a support-set regularization term to further improve contrastive learning by constraining the distance between each image/text and its corresponding cross-modal support-set information contained in the same semantic category. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets (i.e., MIRFLICKR-25K, NUS-WIDE, MS COCO). Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms the strong baselines for cross-modal image-text retrieval. For reproducibility, we submit the code and data publicly at: \urlhttps: //github.com/Hambaobao/CRCGS.