SyncMask: Synchronized Attentional Masking for Fashion-centric Vision-Language Pretraining

Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant strides in cross-modal understanding through large-scale paired datasets. However in fashion domain datasets often exhibit a disparity between the information conveyed in image and text. This issue stems from datasets containing multiple images of a single fashion item all paired with one text leading to cases where some textual details are not visible in individual images. This mismatch particularly when non-co-occurring elements are masked undermines the training of conventional VLM objectives like Masked Language Modeling and Masked Image Modeling thereby hindering the model's ability to accurately align fine-grained visual and textual features. Addressing this problem we propose Synchronized attentional Masking (SyncMask) which generate masks that pinpoint the image patches and word tokens where the information co-occur in both image and text. This synchronization is accomplished by harnessing cross-attentional features obtained from a momentum model ensuring a precise alignment between the two modalities. Additionally we enhance grouped batch sampling with semi-hard negatives effectively mitigating false negative issues in Image-Text Matching and Image-Text Contrastive learning objectives within fashion datasets. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach outperforming existing methods in three downstream tasks.