Enhancing Vision-Language Pre-training with Rich Supervisions
Authors: Yuan Gao, Kunyu Shi, Pengkai Zhu, Edouard Belval, Oren Nuriel, Srikar Appalaraju, Shabnam Ghadar, Zhuowen Tu, Vijay Mahadevan, Stefano Soatto

We propose Strongly Supervised pre-training with ScreenShots (S4) - a novel pre-training paradigm for Vision-Language Models using data from large-scale web screenshot rendering. Using web screenshots unlocks a treasure trove of visual and textual cues that are not present in using image-text pairs. In S4 we leverage the inherent tree-structured hierarchy of HTML elements and the spatial localization to carefully design 10 pre-training tasks with large scale annotated data. These tasks resemble downstream tasks across different domains and the annotations are cheap to obtain. We demonstrate that compared to current screenshot pre-training objectives our innovative pre-training method significantly enhances performance of image-to-text model in nine varied and popular downstream tasks - up to 76.1% improvements on Table Detection and at least 1% on Widget Captioning.