ManagerTower: Aggregating the Insights of Uni-Modal Experts for Vision-Language Representation Learning

Xiao Xu, Bei Li, Chenfei Wu, Shao-Yen Tseng, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, ‫Shachar Rosenman, Vasudev Lal, Wanxiang Che, Nan Duan

Main: Speech and Multimodality Main-oral Paper

Session 7: Speech and Multimodality (Oral)
Conference Room: Pier 4&5
Conference Time: July 12, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 12, Session 7 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Keywords: multimodality
TLDR: Two-Tower Vision-Language (VL) models have shown promising improvements on various downstream VL tasks. Although the most advanced work improves performance by building bridges between encoders, it suffers from ineffective layer-by-layer utilization of uni-modal representations and cannot flexibly e...
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Abstract: Two-Tower Vision-Language (VL) models have shown promising improvements on various downstream VL tasks. Although the most advanced work improves performance by building bridges between encoders, it suffers from ineffective layer-by-layer utilization of uni-modal representations and cannot flexibly exploit different levels of uni-modal semantic knowledge. In this work, we propose ManagerTower, a novel VL model architecture that gathers and combines the insights of pre-trained uni-modal experts at different levels. The managers introduced in each cross-modal layer can adaptively aggregate uni-modal semantic knowledge to facilitate more comprehensive cross-modal alignment and fusion. ManagerTower outperforms previous strong baselines both with and without Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP). With only 4M VLP data, ManagerTower achieves superior performances on various downstream VL tasks, especially 79.15\% accuracy on VQAv2 Test-Std, 86.56\% IR@1 and 95.64\% TR@1 on Flickr30K. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/LooperXX/ManagerTower.