HAAN: Learning a Hierarchical Adaptive Alignment Network for Image-Text Retrieval

Image-text retrieval aims to search related results of one modality by querying another modality. As a fundamental and key problem in cross-modal retrieval, image-text retrieval is still a challenging problem owing to the complementary and imbalanced relationship between different modalities (i.e., Image and Text) and different granularities (i.e., Global-level and Local-level). However, existing works have not fully considered how to effectively mine and fuse the complementarities between images and texts at different granularities. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical adaptive alignment network, whose contributions are as follows: (1) We propose a multi-level alignment network, which simultaneously mines global-level and local-level data, thereby enhancing the semantic association between images and texts. (2) We propose an adaptive weighted loss to flexibly optimize the image-text similarity with two stages in a unified framework. (3) We conduct extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets (Corel 5K, Pascal Sentence, and Wiki) and compare them with eleven state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results thoroughly verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.