VSE++: Improved Visual-Semantic Embeddings

This paper investigates the problem of image-caption retrieval using joint visual-semantic embeddings. We introduce a very simple change to the loss function used in the original formulation by Kiros et al. (2014), which leads to drastic improvements in the retrieval performance. In particular, the original paper uses the rank loss which computes the sum of violations across the negative training examples. Instead, we penalize the model according to the hardest negative examples. We then make several additional modifications according to the current best practices in image-caption retrieval. We showcase our model on the MS-COCO and Flickr30K datasets through comparisons and ablation studies. On MS-COCO, we improve caption retrieval by 21% in R@1 with respect to the original formulation. Our results outperform the state-of-the-art results by 8.8% in caption retrieval and 11.3% in image retrieval at R@1. On Flickr30K, we more than double R@1 as reported by Kiros et al. (2014) in both image and caption retrieval, and achieve near state-of-the-art performance. We further show that similar improvements also apply to the Order-embeddings by Vendrov et al. (2015) which builds on a similar loss function.