Cross-Modal Correlation Learning by Adaptive Hierarchical Semantic Aggregation

With the explosive growth of web data, effective and efficient technologies are in urgent need for retrieving semantically relevant contents of heterogeneous modalities. Previous studies devote efforts to modeling simple cross-modal statistical dependencies, and globally projecting the heterogeneous modalities into a measurable subspace. However, global projections cannot appropriately adapt to diverse contents, and the naturally existing multilevel semantic relation in web data is ignored. We study the problem of semantic coherent retrieval, where documents from different modalities should be ranked by the semantic relevance to the query. Accordingly, we propose TINA, a correlation learning method by adaptive hierarchical semantic aggregation. First, by joint modeling of content and ontology similarities, we build a semantic hierarchy to measure multilevel semantic relevance. Second, with a set of local linear projections and probabilistic membership functions, we propose two paradigms for local expert aggregation, i.e., local projection aggregation and local distance aggregation. To learn the cross-modal projections, we optimize the structure risk objective function that involves semantic coherence measurement, local projection consistency, and the complexity penalty of local projections. Compared to existing approaches, a better bias-variance tradeoff is achieved by TINA in real-world cross-modal correlation learning tasks. Extensive experiments on widely used NUS-WIDE and ICML-Challenge for image–text retrieval demonstrate that TINA better adapts to the multilevel semantic relation and content divergence, and, thus, outperforms state of the art with better semantic coherence.