Existing cross-media retrieval methods are mainly based on the condition where the training set covers all the categories in the testing set, which lack extensibility to retrieve data of new categories. Thus, zero-shot cross-media retrieval has been a promising direction in practical application, aiming to retrieve data of new categories (unseen categories), only with data of limited known categories (seen categories) for training. It is challenging for not only the heterogeneous distributions across different media types, but also the inconsistent semantics across seen and unseen categories need to be handled. To address the above issues, we propose dual adversarial distribution network (DADN), to learn common embeddings and explore the knowledge from word-embeddings of different categories. The main contributions are as follows. First, zero-shot cross-media dual generative adversarial networks architecture is proposed, in which two kinds of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for common embedding generation and representation reconstruction form dual processes. The dual GANs mutually promote to model semantic and underlying structure information, which generalizes across different categories on heterogeneous distributions and boosts correlation learning. Second, distribution matching with maximum mean discrepancy criterion is proposed to combine with dual GANs, which enhances distribution matching between common embeddings and category word-embeddings. Finally, adversarial inter-media metric constraint is proposed with an inter-media loss and a quadruplet loss, which further model the inter-media correlation information and improve semantic ranking ability. The experiments on four widely used cross-media datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our DADN approach.

Existing cross-media retrieval methods are usually conducted under the supervised setting, which need lots of annotated training data. Generally, it is extremely labor-consuming to annotate cross-media data. So unsupervised cross-media retrieval is highly demanded, which is very challenging because it has to handle heterogeneous distributions across different media types without any annotated information. To address the above challenge, this paper proposes Domain Adaptation with Scene Graph (DASG) approach, which transfers knowledge from the source domain to improve cross-media retrieval in the target domain. Our DASG approach takes Visual Genome as the source domain, which contains image knowledge in the form of scene graph. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, we propose to address unsupervised cross-media retrieval by domain adaptation. Instead of using the labor-consuming annotated information of cross-media data in the training stage, our DASG approach learns cross-media correlation knowledge from Visual Genome, and then transfers the knowledge to cross-media retrieval through media alignment and distribution alignment. Second, our DASG approach utilizes fine-grained information via scene graph representation to enhance generalization capability across domains. The generated scene graph representation builds (subject$\rightarrow $ relationship$\rightarrow $ object) triplets by exploiting objects and relationships within image and text, which makes the cross-media correlation more precise and promotes unsupervised cross-media retrieval. Third, we exploit the related tasks including object and relationship detection for learning more discriminative features across domains. Leveraging the semantic information of objects and relationships improves cross-media correlation learning for retrieval. Experiments on two widely-used cross-media retrieval datasets, namely Flickr-30K and MS-COCO, show the effectiveness of our DASG approach.

Existing cross-media retrieval methods usually require that testing categories remain the same with training categories, which cannot support the retrieval of increasing new categories. Inspired by zero-shot learning, this paper proposes zeroshot cross-media retrieval for addressing the above problem, which aims to retrieve data of new categories across different media types. It is challenging that zero-shot cross-media retrieval has to handle not only the inconsistent semantics across new and known categories, but also the heterogeneous distributions across different media types. To address the above challenges, this paper proposes Dual Adversarial Networks for Zero-shot Crossmedia Retrieval (DANZCR), which is the first approach to address zero-shot cross-media retrieval to the best of our knowledge. Our DANZCR approach consists of two GANs in a dual structure for common representation generation and original representation reconstruction respectively, which capture the underlying data structures as well as strengthen relations between input data and semantic space to generalize across seen and unseen categories. Our DANZCR approach exploits word embeddings to learn common representations in semantic space via an adversarial learning method, which preserves the inherent cross-media correlation and enhances the knowledge transfer to new categories. Experiments on three widely-used cross-media retrieval datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.