Weakly-Supervised Learning of Visual Relations in Multimodal Pretraining

Recent work in vision-and-language pretraining has investigated supervised signals from object detection data to learn better, fine-grained multimodal representations. In this work, we take a step further and explore how we add supervision from small-scale visual relation data. In particular, we propose two pretraining approaches to contextualise visual entities in a multimodal setup. With verbalised scene graphs, we transform visual relation triplets into structured captions, and treat them as additional views of images. With masked relation prediction, we further encourage relating entities from visually masked contexts. When applied to strong baselines pretrained on large amounts of Web data, zero-shot evaluations on both coarse-grained and fine-grained tasks show the efficacy of our methods in learning multimodal representations from weakly-supervised relations data.