Current metric learning approaches for image retrieval are usually based on learning a space of informative latent representations where simple approaches such as the cosine distance will work well. Recent state of the art methods such as HypViT move to more complex embedding spaces that may yield better results but are harder to scale to production environments. In this work, we first construct a simpler model based on triplet loss with hard negatives mining that performs at the state of the art level but does not have these drawbacks. Second, we introduce a novel approach for image retrieval postprocessing called Siamese Transformer for Image Retrieval (STIR) that reranks several top outputs in a single forward pass. Unlike previously proposed Reranking Transformers, STIR does not rely on global/local feature extraction and directly compares a query image and a retrieved candidate on pixel level with the usage of attention mechanism. The resulting approach defines a new state of the art on standard image retrieval datasets: Stanford Online Products and DeepFashion In-shop. We also release the source code at //github.com/OML-Team/open-metric-learning/tree/main/pipelines/postprocessing/ and an interactive demo of our approach at //dapladoc-oml-postprocessing-demo-srcappmain-pfh2g0.streamlit.app/
In this paper, we consider the problem of composed image retrieval (CIR), it aims to train a model that can fuse multi-modal information, e.g., text and images, to accurately retrieve images that match the query, extending the user's expression ability. We make the following contributions: (i) we initiate a scalable pipeline to automatically construct datasets for training CIR model, by simply exploiting a large-scale dataset of image-text pairs, e.g., a subset of LAION-5B; (ii) we introduce a transformer-based adaptive aggregation model, TransAgg, which employs a simple yet efficient fusion mechanism, to adaptively combine information from diverse modalities; (iii) we conduct extensive ablation studies to investigate the usefulness of our proposed data construction procedure, and the effectiveness of core components in TransAgg; (iv) when evaluating on the publicly available benckmarks under the zero-shot scenario, i.e., training on the automatically constructed datasets, then directly conduct inference on target downstream datasets, e.g., CIRR and FashionIQ, our proposed approach either performs on par with or significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. Project page: //code-kunkun.github.io/ZS-CIR/
Contrastive image-text models such as CLIP form the building blocks of many state-of-the-art systems. While they excel at recognizing common generic concepts, they still struggle on fine-grained entities which are rare, or even absent from the pre-training dataset. Hence, a key ingredient to their success has been the use of large-scale curated pre-training data aiming at expanding the set of concepts that they can memorize during the pre-training stage. In this work, we explore an alternative to encoding fine-grained knowledge directly into the model's parameters: we instead train the model to retrieve this knowledge from an external memory. Specifically, we propose to equip existing vision-text models with the ability to refine their embedding with cross-modal retrieved information from a memory at inference time, which greatly improves their zero-shot predictions. Remarkably, we show that this can be done with a light-weight, single-layer, fusion transformer on top of a frozen CLIP. Our experiments validate that our retrieval-enhanced contrastive (RECO) training improves CLIP performance substantially on several challenging fine-grained tasks: for example +10.9 on Stanford Cars, +10.2 on CUB-2011 and +7.3 on the recent OVEN benchmark.
Diffusion models have recently dominated image synthesis and other related generative tasks. However, the iterative denoising process is expensive in computations at inference time, making diffusion models less practical for low-latency and scalable real-world applications. Post-training quantization of diffusion models can significantly reduce the model size and accelerate the sampling process without requiring any re-training. Nonetheless, applying existing post-training quantization methods directly to low-bit diffusion models can significantly impair the quality of generated samples. Specifically, for each denoising step, quantization noise leads to deviations in the estimated mean and mismatches with the predetermined variance schedule. Moreover, as the sampling process proceeds, the quantization noise may accumulate, resulting in a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in late denoising steps. To address these challenges, we propose a unified formulation for the quantization noise and diffusion perturbed noise in the quantized denoising process. We first disentangle the quantization noise into its correlated and residual uncorrelated parts regarding its full-precision counterpart. The correlated part can be easily corrected by estimating the correlation coefficient. For the uncorrelated part, we calibrate the denoising variance schedule to absorb the excess variance resulting from quantization. Moreover, we propose a mixed-precision scheme to choose the optimal bitwidth for each denoising step, which prefers low bits to accelerate the early denoising steps while high bits maintain the high SNR for the late steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous post-training quantized diffusion models in generating high-quality samples, with only a 0.06 increase in FID score compared to full-precision LDM-4 on ImageNet 256x256, while saving 19.9x bit operations.
The core of information retrieval (IR) is to identify relevant information from large-scale resources and return it as a ranked list to respond to user's information need. Recently, the resurgence of deep learning has greatly advanced this field and leads to a hot topic named NeuIR (i.e., neural information retrieval), especially the paradigm of pre-training methods (PTMs). Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model size, pre-trained models can learn universal language representations from massive textual data, which are beneficial to the ranking task of IR. Since there have been a large number of works dedicating to the application of PTMs in IR, we believe it is the right time to summarize the current status, learn from existing methods, and gain some insights for future development. In this survey, we present an overview of PTMs applied in different components of IR system, including the retrieval component, the re-ranking component, and other components. In addition, we also introduce PTMs specifically designed for IR, and summarize available datasets as well as benchmark leaderboards. Moreover, we discuss some open challenges and envision some promising directions, with the hope of inspiring more works on these topics for future research.
Multi-stage ranking pipelines have been a practical solution in modern search systems, where the first-stage retrieval is to return a subset of candidate documents, and latter stages attempt to re-rank those candidates. Unlike re-ranking stages going through quick technique shifts during past decades, the first-stage retrieval has long been dominated by classical term-based models. Unfortunately, these models suffer from the vocabulary mismatch problem, which may block re-ranking stages from relevant documents at the very beginning. Therefore, it has been a long-term desire to build semantic models for the first-stage retrieval that can achieve high recall efficiently. Recently, we have witnessed an explosive growth of research interests on the first-stage semantic retrieval models. We believe it is the right time to survey current status, learn from existing methods, and gain some insights for future development. In this paper, we describe the current landscape of the first-stage retrieval models under a unified framework to clarify the connection between classical term-based retrieval methods, early semantic retrieval methods and neural semantic retrieval methods. Moreover, we identify some open challenges and envision some future directions, with the hope of inspiring more researches on these important yet less investigated topics.
In recent years a vast amount of visual content has been generated and shared from various fields, such as social media platforms, medical images, and robotics. This abundance of content creation and sharing has introduced new challenges. In particular, searching databases for similar content, i.e. content based image retrieval (CBIR), is a long-established research area, and more efficient and accurate methods are needed for real time retrieval. Artificial intelligence has made progress in CBIR and has significantly facilitated the process of intelligent search. In this survey we organize and review recent CBIR works that are developed based on deep learning algorithms and techniques, including insights and techniques from recent papers. We identify and present the commonly-used databases, benchmarks, and evaluation methods used in the field. We collect common challenges and propose promising future directions. More specifically, we focus on image retrieval with deep learning and organize the state of the art methods according to the types of deep network structure, deep features, feature enhancement methods, and network fine-tuning strategies. Our survey considers a wide variety of recent methods, aiming to promote a global view of the field of category-based CBIR.
Search in social networks such as Facebook poses different challenges than in classical web search: besides the query text, it is important to take into account the searcher's context to provide relevant results. Their social graph is an integral part of this context and is a unique aspect of Facebook search. While embedding-based retrieval (EBR) has been applied in eb search engines for years, Facebook search was still mainly based on a Boolean matching model. In this paper, we discuss the techniques for applying EBR to a Facebook Search system. We introduce the unified embedding framework developed to model semantic embeddings for personalized search, and the system to serve embedding-based retrieval in a typical search system based on an inverted index. We discuss various tricks and experiences on end-to-end optimization of the whole system, including ANN parameter tuning and full-stack optimization. Finally, we present our progress on two selected advanced topics about modeling. We evaluated EBR on verticals for Facebook Search with significant metrics gains observed in online A/B experiments. We believe this paper will provide useful insights and experiences to help people on developing embedding-based retrieval systems in search engines.
Hashing has been widely used in approximate nearest search for large-scale database retrieval for its computation and storage efficiency. Deep hashing, which devises convolutional neural network architecture to exploit and extract the semantic information or feature of images, has received increasing attention recently. In this survey, several deep supervised hashing methods for image retrieval are evaluated and I conclude three main different directions for deep supervised hashing methods. Several comments are made at the end. Moreover, to break through the bottleneck of the existing hashing methods, I propose a Shadow Recurrent Hashing(SRH) method as a try. Specifically, I devise a CNN architecture to extract the semantic features of images and design a loss function to encourage similar images projected close. To this end, I propose a concept: shadow of the CNN output. During optimization process, the CNN output and its shadow are guiding each other so as to achieve the optimal solution as much as possible. Several experiments on dataset CIFAR-10 show the satisfying performance of SRH.
In this paper we address issues with image retrieval benchmarking on standard and popular Oxford 5k and Paris 6k datasets. In particular, annotation errors, the size of the dataset, and the level of challenge are addressed: new annotation for both datasets is created with an extra attention to the reliability of the ground truth. Three new protocols of varying difficulty are introduced. The protocols allow fair comparison between different methods, including those using a dataset pre-processing stage. For each dataset, 15 new challenging queries are introduced. Finally, a new set of 1M hard, semi-automatically cleaned distractors is selected. An extensive comparison of the state-of-the-art methods is performed on the new benchmark. Different types of methods are evaluated, ranging from local-feature-based to modern CNN based methods. The best results are achieved by taking the best of the two worlds. Most importantly, image retrieval appears far from being solved.
Most of the internet today is composed of digital media that includes videos and images. With pixels becoming the currency in which most transactions happen on the internet, it is becoming increasingly important to have a way of browsing through this ocean of information with relative ease. YouTube has 400 hours of video uploaded every minute and many million images are browsed on Instagram, Facebook, etc. Inspired by recent advances in the field of deep learning and success that it has gained on various problems like image captioning and, machine translation , word2vec , skip thoughts, etc, we present DeepSeek a natural language processing based deep learning model that allows users to enter a description of the kind of images that they want to search, and in response the system retrieves all the images that semantically and contextually relate to the query. Two approaches are described in the following sections.