FaD-VLP: Fashion Vision-and-Language Pre-training towards Unified Retrieval and Captioning

Multimodal tasks in the fashion domain have significant potential for e-commerce, but involve challenging vision-and-language learning problems—e.g., retrieving a fashion item given a reference image plus text feedback from a user. Prior works on multimodal fashion tasks have either been limited by the data in individual benchmarks, or have leveraged generic vision-and-language pre-training but have not taken advantage of the characteristics of fashion data. Additionally, these works have mainly been restricted to multimodal understanding tasks. To address these gaps, we make two key contributions. First, we propose a novel fashion-specific pre-training framework based on weakly-supervised triplets constructed from fashion image-text pairs. We show the triplet-based tasks are an effective addition to standard multimodal pre-training tasks. Second, we propose a flexible decoder-based model architecture capable of both fashion retrieval and captioning tasks. Together, our model design and pre-training approach are competitive on a diverse set of fashion tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, image retrieval with text feedback, image captioning, relative image captioning, and multimodal categorization.