Grounded Image Text Matching with Mismatched Relation Reasoning

Abstract

This paper introduces Grounded Image Text Matching with Mismatched Relation (GITM-MR), a novel visual-linguistic joint task that evaluates the relation understanding capabilities of transformer-based pre-trained models. GITM-MR requires a model to first determine if an expression describes an image, then localize referred objects or ground the mismatched parts of the text. We provide a benchmark for evaluating vision-language (VL) models on this task, with a focus on the challenging settings of limited training data and out-of-distribution sentence lengths. Our evaluation demonstrates that pre-trained VL models often lack data efficiency and length generalization ability. To address this, we propose the Relation-sensitive Correspondence Reasoning Network (RCRN), which incorporates relation-aware reasoning via bi-directional message propagation guided by language structure. Our RCRN can be interpreted as a modular program and delivers strong performance in terms of both length generalization and data efficiency. The code and data are available on https://github.com/SHTUPLUS/GITM-MR.