Cross-modal alignment with graph reasoning for image-text retrieval

Image-text retrieval task has received a lot of attention in the modern research field of artificial intelligence. It still remains challenging since image and text are heterogeneous cross-modal data. The key issue of image-text retrieval is how to learn a common feature space while semantic correspondence between image and text remains. Existing works cannot gain fine cross-modal feature representation because the semantic relation between local features is not effectively utilized and the noise information is not suppressed. In order to address these issues, we propose a Cross-modal Alignment with Graph Reasoning (CAGR) model, in which the refined cross-modal features in the common feature space are learned and then a fine-grained cross-modal alignment method is implemented. Specifically, we introduce a graph reasoning module to explore semantic connection for local elements in each modality and measure their importance by self-attention mechanism. In a multi-step reasoning manner, the visual semantic graph and textual semantic graph can be effectively learned and the refined visual and textual features can be obtained. Finally, to measure the similarity between image and text, a novel alignment approach named cross-modal attentional fine-grained alignment is used to compute similarity score between two sets of features. Our model achieves the competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods on Flickr30K dataset and MS-COCO dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.