Efficient text-image semantic search: A multi-modal vision-language approach for fashion retrieval

In this paper, we address the problem of multi-modal retrieval of fashion products. State-of-the-art (SOTA) works proposed in literature use vision-and-language transformers to assign similarity scores to joint text-image pairs, then used for sorting the results during a retrieval phase. However, this approach is inefficient since it requires coupling a query with every record in the dataset and computing a forward pass for each sample at runtime, precluding scalability to large-scale datasets. We thus propose a solution that overcomes the above limitation by combining transformers and deep metric learning to create a latent space where texts and images are separately embedded, and their spatial proximity translates into semantic similarity. Our architecture does not use convolutional neural networks to process images, allowing us to test different levels of image-processing details and metric learning losses. We vastly improve retrieval accuracy results on the FashionGen benchmark (+18.71% and +9.22% Rank@1 on Image-to-Text and Text-to-Image, respectively) while being up to 512x faster. Finally, we analyze the speed-up obtainable by different approximate nearest neighbor retrieval strategies—an optimization precluded to current SOTA contributions. We release our solution as a web application available at https://disi-unibo-nlp.github.io/projects/fashion_retrieval/.