Noise-robust Cross-modal Interactive Learning with Text2Image Mask for Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation

Abstract

Multi-modal neural machine translation (MNMT) aims to improve textual level machine translation performance in the presence of text-related images. Most of the previous works on MNMT focus on multi-modal fusion methods with full visual features. However, text and its corresponding image may not match exactly, visual noise is generally inevitable. The irrelevant image regions may mislead or distract the textual attention and cause model performance degradation. This paper proposes a noise-robust multi-modal interactive fusion approach with cross-modal relation-aware mask mechanism for MNMT. A text-image relation-aware attention module is constructed through the cross-modal interaction mask mechanism, and visual features are extracted based on the text-image interaction mask knowledge. Then a noise-robust multi-modal adaptive fusion approach is presented by fusion the relevant visual and textual features for machine translation. We validate our method on the Multi30K dataset. The experimental results show the superiority of our proposed model, and achieve the state-of-the-art scores in all En-De, En-Fr and En-Cs translation tasks.