VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations

We introduce a new pre-trainable generic representation for visual-linguistic tasks, called Visual-Linguistic BERT (VL-BERT for short). VL-BERT adopts the simple yet powerful Transformer model as the backbone, and extends it to take both visual and linguistic embedded features as input. In it, each element of the input is either of a word from the input sentence, or a region-of-interest (RoI) from the input image. It is designed to fit for most of the visual-linguistic downstream tasks. To better exploit the generic representation, we pre-train VL-BERT on the massive-scale Conceptual Captions dataset, together with text-only corpus. Extensive empirical analysis demonstrates that the pre-training procedure can better align the visual-linguistic clues and benefit the downstream tasks, such as visual commonsense reasoning, visual question answering and referring expression comprehension. It is worth noting that VL-BERT achieved the first place of single model on the leaderboard of the VCR benchmark. Code is released at \url{https://github.com/jackroos/VL-BERT}.

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Image-text matching CommercialAdsDataset VL-BERT ADD(S) AUC 86.27 # 5
Referring Expression Comprehension Talk2Car VL-Bert (Base) AP50 63.1 # 9
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VCR (Q-A) dev VL-BERTLARGE Accuracy 75.5 # 1
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VCR (Q-A) dev VL-BERTBASE Accuracy 73.8 # 2
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VCR (Q-AR) dev VL-BERTLARGE Accuracy 58.9 # 1
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VCR (Q-AR) dev VL-BERTBASE Accuracy 55.2 # 2
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VCR (QA-R) dev VL-BERTBASE Accuracy 74.4 # 2
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VCR (QA-R) dev VL-BERTLARGE Accuracy 77.9 # 1
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VCR (Q-AR) test VL-BERTLARGE Accuracy 59.7 # 5
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VCR (QA-R) test VL-BERTLARGE Accuracy 78.4 # 6
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VCR (Q-A) test VL-BERTLARGE Accuracy 75.8 # 7
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VQA v2 test-dev VL-BERTBASE Accuracy 71.16 # 27
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VQA v2 test-dev VL-BERTLARGE Accuracy 71.79 # 24
Visual Question Answering (VQA) VQA v2 test-std VL-BERTLARGE overall 72.2 # 23

Methods