UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning

Wei Li, Can Gao, Guocheng Niu, Xinyan Xiao, Hao Liu, Jiachen Liu, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang


Abstract
Existed pre-training methods either focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal tasks, and cannot effectively adapt to each other. They can only utilize single-modal data (i.e., text or image) or limited multi-modal data (i.e., image-text pairs). In this work, we propose a UNIfied-MOdal pre-training architecture, namely UNIMO, which can effectively adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. Large scale of free text corpus and image collections are utilized to improve the capability of visual and textual understanding, and cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL) is leveraged to align the textual and visual information into a unified semantic space, over a corpus of image-text pairs augmented with related images and texts. With the help of rich non-paired single-modal data, our model is able to learn more generalizable representations, by allowing textual knowledge and visual knowledge to enhance each other in the unified semantic space. The experimental results show that UNIMO greatly improves the performance of several single-modal and multi-modal downstream tasks. Our code and pre-trained models are public at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/NLP/UNIMO.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.202
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2592–2607
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.202
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.202
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wei Li, Can Gao, Guocheng Niu, Xinyan Xiao, Hao Liu, Jiachen Liu, Hua Wu, and Haifeng Wang. 2021. UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2592–2607, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (Li et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.202.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.202.mp4
Code
 PaddlePaddle/PaddleNLP +  additional community code
Data
CoQAFlickr30kMS COCOMultiNLISNLI-VESSTSST-2Visual Genome