AMNS: Attention-Weighted Selective Mask and Noise Label Suppression for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval

Text-to-image person retrieval aims to retrieve images of person given textual descriptions, and most methods implicitly assume that the training image-text pairs are correctly aligned, but in practice, under-correlated and false-correlated problems arise for image-text pairs due to poor image quality and mislabeling. Meanwhile, the random masking augmentation strategy may incorrectly discard semantic content resulting in the problem of generating noisy pairings between image lexical elements and text descriptions. To solve these two problems, we propose a new noise label suppression method and alleviate the problem generated by random mask through an attention-weighted selective mask strategy. In the proposed noise label suppression method, the effect of noise labels is suppressed by preventing the model from being overconfident by considering the inverse KL scatter loss, which is combined with the weight adjustment focus loss to further improve the model's recognition ability on difficult samples. On the other hand, Attention-Weighted Selective Mask processes the raw image through the EMA version of the image encoder, retaining some of the tokens with strong semantic associations with the corresponding text descriptions in order to extract better features. Numerous experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of dealing with noisy problems. The code will be available soon at https://github.com/RunQing715/AMNS.git.