Vision-and-Language Pretraining: Methods, Applications, and Future Challenges

With the burgeoning amount of data of image-text pairs and diversity of Vision-and-Language (V&L) tasks, scholars have introduced an abundance of deep learning models in this research domain. Furthermore, in recent years, transfer learning has also shown tremendous success in Computer Vision for tasks such as Image Classification, Object Detection, etc., and in Natural Language Processing for Question Answering, Machine Translation, etc. Inheriting the spirit of Transfer Learning, research works in V&L have devised multiple pretraining techniques on large-scale datasets in order to enhance the performance of downstream tasks. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive revision of contemporary V&L pretraining models. In particular, we categorize and delineate pretrain-ing approaches, along with the summary of state-of-the-art vision-and-language pretrained models. Moreover, a list of training datasets and downstream tasks is supplied to further polish the perspective into V&L pretraining. Lastly, we decided to take a further step to discuss numerous directions for future research.