Seeing Out of the Box: End-to-End Pre-Training for Vision-Language Representation Learning

We study joint learning of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Transformer for vision-language pre-training (VLPT) which aims to learn cross-modal alignments from millions of image-text pairs. State-of-the-art approaches extract salient image regions and align regions with words step-by-step. As region-based visual features usually represent parts of an image, it is challenging for existing visionlanguage models to fully understand the semantics from paired natural languages. In this paper, we propose SOHO to "See Out of tHe bOx" that takes a whole image as input, and learns vision-language representation in an endto-end manner. SOHO does not require bounding box annotations which enables inference 10 times faster than regionbased approaches. In particular, SOHO learns to extract comprehensive yet compact image features through a visual dictionary (VD) that facilitates cross-modal understanding. VD is designed to represent consistent visual abstractions of similar semantics. It is updated on-the-fly and utilized in our proposed pre-training task Masked Visual Modeling (MVM). We conduct experiments on four well-established vision-language tasks by following standard VLPT settings. In particular, SOHO achieves absolute gains of 2.0% R@1 score on MSCOCO text retrieval 5k test split, 1.5% accuracy on NLVR 2 test-P split, 6.7% accuracy on SNLI-VE test split, respectively.