Compound Tokens: Channel Fusion for Vision-Language Representation Learning

Maxwell Mbabilla Aladago, AJ Piergiovanni

Keywords: question answering tasks, multi-modal fusion, vision-language model, representation learning

TL;DR: We provide a new multi-modal fusion method that concatenates tokens along the channel dimension.

Abstract:

We present an effective method for fusing visual-and-language representations for several question answering tasks including visual question answering and visual entailment.
In contrast to prior works that concatenate unimodal representations or use only cross-attention, we compose multimodal representations via channel fusion. By fusing on the channels, the model is able to more effectively align the tokens compared to standard methods. These multimodal representations, which we call compound tokens are generated with cross-attention transformer layers. First, vision tokens are used as queries to retrieve compatible text tokens through cross-attention. We then chain the vision tokens and the queried text tokens along the channel dimension. We call the resulting representations compound tokens. A second group of compound tokens are generated using an analogous process where the text tokens serve as queries to the cross-attention layer. We concatenate all the compound tokens for further processing with multimodal encoder. We demonstrate the effectiveness of compound tokens using an encoder-decoder vision-language model trained end-to-end in the open-vocabulary setting. Compound Tokens achieve highly competitive performance across a range of question answering tasks including GQA, VQA2.0, and SNLI-VE.
We plan to make the code public.

Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors’ identity.

No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.

Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics

Submission Guidelines: Yes

Please Choose The Closest Area That Your Submission Falls Into: Deep Learning and representational learning