DiCA: Disambiguated Contrastive Alignment for Cross-Modal Retrieval with Partial Labels

Cross-modal retrieval aims to retrieve relevant data across different modalities. Driven by costly massive labeled data, existing cross-modal retrieval methods achieve encouraging results. To reduce annotation costs while maintaining performance, this paper focuses on an untouched but challenging problem, i.e., cross-modal retrieval with partial labels (PLCMR). PLCMR faces the dual challenges of annotation ambiguity and modality gap. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method termed disambiguated contrastive alignment (DiCA) for cross-modal retrieval with partial labels. Specifically, DiCA proposes a novel non-candidate boosted disambiguation learning mechanism (NBDL), which elaborately balances the trade-off between the losses on candidate and non-candidate labels that eliminate label ambiguity and narrow the modality gap. Moreover, DiCA presents an instance-prototype representation learning mechanism (IPRL) to enhance the model by further eliminating the modality gap at both the instance and prototype levels. Thanks to NBDL and IPRL, our DiCA effectively addresses the issues of annotation ambiguity and modality gap for cross-modal retrieval with partial labels. Experiments on four benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which demonstrates enhanced performance over existing state-of-the-art methods.