MISTI: Metadata-Informed Scientific Text and Image Representation through Contrastive Learning

AbstractIn scientific publications, automatic representations of figures and their captions can be used in NLP, computer vision, and information retrieval tasks. Contrastive learning has proven effective for creating such joint representations for natural scenes, but its application to scientific imagery and descriptions remains under-explored. Recent open-access publication datasets provide an opportunity to understand the effectiveness of this technique as well as evaluate the usefulness of additional metadata, which are available only in the scientific context. Here, we introduce MISTI, a novel model that uses contrastive learning to simultaneously learn the representation of figures, captions, and metadata, such as a paper’s title, sections, and curated concepts from the PubMed Open Access Subset. We evaluate our model on multiple information retrieval tasks, showing substantial improvements over baseline models. Notably, incorporating metadata doubled retrieval performance, achieving a Recall@1 of 30% on a 70K-item caption retrieval task. We qualitatively explore how metadata can be used to strategically retrieve distinctive representations of the same concept but for different sections, such as introduction and results. Additionally, we show that our model seamlessly handles out-of-domain tasks related to image segmentation. We share our dataset and methods (https://github.com/Khempawin/scientific-image-caption-pair/tree/section-attr) and outline future research directions.