Multiscale Superpixel Structured Difference Graph Convolutional Network for VL Representation

Within the multimodal field, the key to integrating vision and language lies in establishing a good alignment strategy. Recently, benefiting from the success of self-supervised learning, significant progress has been made in multimodal semantic representation based on pre-trained models for vision and language. However, there is still room for improvement in visual semantic representation. The lack of spatial semantic coherence and vulnerability to noise makes it challenging for current pixel or patch-based methods to accurately extract complex scene boundaries. To this end, this paper develops superpixel as a comprehensive compact representation of learnable image data, which effectively reduces the number of visual primitives for subsequent processing by clustering perceptually similar pixels. To mine more precise topological relations, we propose a Multiscale Difference Graph Convolutional Network (MDGCN). It parses the entire image as a fine-to-coarse hierarchical structure of constituent visual patterns, and captures multiscale features by progressively merging adjacent superpixels as graph nodes. Moreover, we predict the differences between adjacent nodes through the graph structure, facilitating key information aggregation of graph nodes to reason actual semantic relations. Afterward, we design a multi-level fusion rule in a bottom-up manner to avoid understanding deviation by learning complementary spatial information at different regional scales. Our proposed method can be well applied to multiple downstream task learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is competitive with other state-of-the-art methods in visual reasoning. Our code will be released upon publication.