Learning with Noisy Correspondence for Cross-modal Matching

Cross-modal matching, which aims to establish the correspondence between two different modalities, is fundamental to a variety of tasks such as cross-modal retrieval and vision-and-language understanding. Although a huge number of crossmodal matching methods have been proposed and achieved remarkable progress in recent years, almost all of these methods implicitly assume that the multimodal training data are correctly aligned. In practice, however, such an assumption is extremely expensive even impossible to satisfy. Based on this observation, we reveal and study a latent and challenging direction in cross-modal matching, named noisy correspondence, which could be regarded as a new paradigm of noisy labels. Different from the traditional noisy labels which mainly refer to the errors in category labels, our noisy correspondence refers to the mismatch paired samples. To solve this new problem, we propose a novel method for learning with noisy correspondence, named Noisy Correspondence Rectifier (NCR). In brief, NCR divides the data into clean and noisy partitions based on the memorization effect of neural networks and then rectifies the correspondence via an adaptive prediction model in a co-teaching manner. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct experiments by using the image-text matching as a showcase. Extensive experiments on Flickr30K, MS-COCO, and Conceptual Captions verify the effectiveness of our method. The code could be accessed from www.pengxi. me. * Some parts of the work was done while Zhenyu Huang was an internship at Baidu Inc. † Corresponding author. 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021).