KG-FLIP: Knowledge-guided Fashion-domain Language-Image Pre-training for E-commerce

Abstract

Various Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models (e.g., CLIP, BLIP) have sprung up and dramatically advanced the benchmarks for public general-domain datasets (e.g., COCO, Flickr30k). Such models usually learn the cross-modal alignment from large-scale well-aligned image-text datasets without leveraging external knowledge. Adapting these models to downstream applications in specific domains like fashion requires fine-grained in-domain image-text corpus, which are usually less semantically aligned and in small scale that requires efficient pre-training strategies. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-guided fashion-domain language-image pre-training (FLIP) framework that focuses on learning fine-grained representations in e-commerce domain and utilizes external knowledge (i.e., product attribute schema), to improve the pre-training efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that FLIP outperforms previous state-of-the-art VLP models on Amazon data and on the Fashion-Gen dataset by large margins. FLIP has been successfully deployed in the Amazon catalog system to backfill missing attributes and improve the customer shopping experience.