Vision-language pre-training (VLP) methods are blossoming recently, and its crucial goal is to jointly learn visual and textual features via a transformer-based architecture, demonstrating promising improvements on a variety of vision-language tasks. Prior arts usually focus on how to align visual and textual features, but strategies for improving the robustness of model and speeding up model convergence are left insufficiently explored. In this paper, we propose a novel method ViLTA, comprising of two components to further facilitate the model to learn fine-grained representations among image-text pairs. For Masked Language Modeling (MLM), we propose a cross-distillation method to generate soft labels to enhance the robustness of model, which alleviates the problem of treating synonyms of masked words as negative samples in one-hot labels. For Image-Text Matching (ITM), we leverage the current language encoder to synthesize hard negatives based on the context of language input, encouraging the model to learn high-quality representations by increasing the difficulty of the ITM task. By leveraging the above techniques, our ViLTA can achieve better performance on various vision-language tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the effectiveness of ViLTA and its promising potential for vision-language pre-training.

本文提出了一种名为ViLTA的新方法，由两个组件组成，旨在进一步促进模型在图像和文本对之间学习细粒度表示，采用交叉蒸馏方法生成软标签以提高模型的稳健性，并利用上下文合成硬负样本来增加图像-文本匹配的难度，从而在各种视觉语言任务上取得更好的性能。大量的基准数据集实验证明了ViLTA的有效性和其在视觉语言预训练中的潜力。

ViLTA：通过文本增强增强视觉语言预训练