Kernel triplet loss for image-text retrieval

Triplet loss is widely used as the objective function in image-text retrieval tasks. However, as all the triplets are treated equally, triplet loss has a bottleneck problem of slow convergence and other unsatisfactory performances. In this article, we propose solutions by appropriately weighting triplets according to the relative similarities among the training samples. Specifically, we present three weighting functions to assign an appropriate weight for the selected informative triplets to accelerate the convergence. We evaluate our approach on two widely used benchmark datasets: Flickr30k and MSCOCO, with results outperforming the previous methods, which demonstrates its superiority.