DREAM: Decoupled Discriminative Learning with Bigraph-aware Alignment for Semi-supervised 2D-3D Cross-modal Retrieval

Abstract With the burst of big data, 2D-3D cross-modal retrieval has received increasing attention, which aims to retrieve relevant data from one modality given the query from the other modality. In this paper, we study an underexplored yet practical problem of semi-supervised 2D-3D cross-modal retrieval, which could suffer from serious label scarcity in real-world applications. Moreover, the huge heterogeneous gap could deteriorate the process of learning from unlabeled data. In this work, we propose a novel approach named Decoupled Discriminative Learning with Bigraph-aware Alignment (DREAM) for semi-supervised 2D-3D cross-modal retrieval. The core of our DREAM is to decouple the label prediction and reliability measurement processes to reduce overconfident samples in discriminative learning. In particular, we enhance a label prediction module with label propagation from labeled samples and additionally introduce a reliability measurement module to learn the scores of predicted labels. To reduce class-related bias, we compare reliability scores with class-specific adaptive thresholds to identify samples for additional learning. In addition, negative labels are estimated for unselected samples, which guides soft semantic learning to make the best use of all the information. To further minimize the heterogeneous gap, we build a bigraph graph that connects cross-modal similar examples and then conduct learning to cluster with most edges kept for alignment. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets validate the superiority of the proposed DREAM.