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Main Authors: Pan, Zhengxin, Wang, Haishuai, Wu, Fangyu, Zhang, Bailing, Bu, Jiajun, Chen, Hongyang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14349
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author Pan, Zhengxin
Wang, Haishuai
Wu, Fangyu
Zhang, Bailing
Bu, Jiajun
Chen, Hongyang
author_facet Pan, Zhengxin
Wang, Haishuai
Wu, Fangyu
Zhang, Bailing
Bu, Jiajun
Chen, Hongyang
contents Cross-modal matching, a fundamental task in bridging vision and language, has recently garnered substantial research interest. Despite the development of numerous methods aimed at quantifying the semantic relatedness between image-text pairs, these methods often fall short of achieving both outstanding performance and high efficiency. In this paper, we propose the crOss-Modal sInkhorn maTching (OMIT) network as an effective solution to effectively improving performance while maintaining efficiency. Rooted in the theoretical foundations of Optimal Transport, OMIT harnesses the capabilities of Cross-modal Mover's Distance to precisely compute the similarity between fine-grained visual and textual fragments, utilizing Sinkhorn iterations for efficient approximation. To further alleviate the issue of redundant alignments, we seamlessly integrate partial matching into OMIT, leveraging local-to-global similarities to eliminate the interference of irrelevant fragments. We conduct extensive evaluations of OMIT on two benchmark image-text retrieval datasets, namely Flickr30K and MS-COCO. The superior performance achieved by OMIT on both datasets unequivocally demonstrates its effectiveness in cross-modal matching. Furthermore, through comprehensive visualization analysis, we elucidate OMIT's inherent tendency towards focal matching, thereby shedding light on its efficacy. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ppanzx/OMIT.
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spellingShingle Learning Image-Text Matching with Optimal Partial Transport
Pan, Zhengxin
Wang, Haishuai
Wu, Fangyu
Zhang, Bailing
Bu, Jiajun
Chen, Hongyang
Information Retrieval
Cross-modal matching, a fundamental task in bridging vision and language, has recently garnered substantial research interest. Despite the development of numerous methods aimed at quantifying the semantic relatedness between image-text pairs, these methods often fall short of achieving both outstanding performance and high efficiency. In this paper, we propose the crOss-Modal sInkhorn maTching (OMIT) network as an effective solution to effectively improving performance while maintaining efficiency. Rooted in the theoretical foundations of Optimal Transport, OMIT harnesses the capabilities of Cross-modal Mover's Distance to precisely compute the similarity between fine-grained visual and textual fragments, utilizing Sinkhorn iterations for efficient approximation. To further alleviate the issue of redundant alignments, we seamlessly integrate partial matching into OMIT, leveraging local-to-global similarities to eliminate the interference of irrelevant fragments. We conduct extensive evaluations of OMIT on two benchmark image-text retrieval datasets, namely Flickr30K and MS-COCO. The superior performance achieved by OMIT on both datasets unequivocally demonstrates its effectiveness in cross-modal matching. Furthermore, through comprehensive visualization analysis, we elucidate OMIT's inherent tendency towards focal matching, thereby shedding light on its efficacy. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ppanzx/OMIT.
title Learning Image-Text Matching with Optimal Partial Transport
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14349