What is: Vision-Language pretrained Model?

VLMo is a unified vision-language pre-trained model that jointly learns a dual encoder and a fusion encoder with a modular Transformer network. A Mixture-of-Modality-Experts (MOME) transformer is introduced to encode different modalities which helps it to capture modality-specific information by modality experts, and align content of different modalities by the self-attention module shared across modalities. The model parameters are shared across image-text contrastive learning, masked language modeling, and image-text matching tasks. During fine-tuning, the flexible modeling allows for VLMO to be used as either a dual encoder (i.e., separately encode images and text for retrieval tasks) or a fusion encoder (i.e., jointly encode image-text pairs for better interaction across modalities) Stage-wise pretraining on image-only and text-only data improved the vision-language pre-trained model. The model can be used for classification tasks and fine-tuned as a dual encoder for retrieval tasks.