Embrace Smaller Attention: Efficient Cross-Modal Matching with Dual Gated Attention Fusion

Cross-modal matching is one of the most fundamental and widely studied tasks in the field of data science. To have a better understanding of the complicated cross-modal correspondences, the powerful attention mechanism has been widely used recently. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual Gated Attention Fusion (DGAF) unit to save cross-modal matching from heavy attention computation. Specifically, the attention unit in the main information flow is alternated to a single-head low-dimension light-weighted attention bypass which serves as a gate to selectively cast away noise in both modality. To strengthen the interaction between modalities, an auxiliary memory unit is appended. A gated memory fusion unit is designed to fuse the memorized inter-modality information into both modality streams. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed DGAF achieves good balance between the efficiency and the effectiveness.