# Image-Text Retrieval Embdding with ALBEF

*author: David Wang*


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## Description

This operator extracts features for image or text with [ALBEF](https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07651) which can generate embeddings for text and image by jointly training an image encoder and text encoder to maximize the cosine similarity. This research introduced a contrastive loss to ALign the image and text representations BEfore Fusing (ALBEF) them through cross-modal attention, which enables more grounded vision and language representation learning. This repo is an adaptation from [salesforce / ALBEF](https://github.com/salesforce/ALBEF)


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## Code Example

Load an image from path './teddy.jpg' to generate an image embedding. 

Read the text 'A teddybear on a skateboard in Times Square.' to generate an text embedding. 

 *Write the pipeline in simplified style*:

```python

from towhee import pipe, ops, DataCollection

img_pipe = (
    pipe.input('url')
    .map('url', 'img', ops.image_decode.cv2_rgb())
    .map('img', 'vec', ops.image_text_embedding.albef(model_name='albef_4m', modality='image')) 
    .output('img', 'vec')
)

text_pipe = (
    pipe.input('text')
    .map('text', 'vec', ops.image_text_embedding.albef(model_name='albef_4m', modality='text')) 
    .output('text', 'vec')
)

DataCollection(img_pipe('./teddy.jpg')).show()
DataCollection(text_pipe('A teddybear on a skateboard in Times Square.')).show()
```

<img src="./tabular1.png" alt="result1" style="height:60px;"/>
<img src="./tabular2.png" alt="result2" style="height:60px;"/>


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## Factory Constructor

Create the operator via the following factory method

***albef(model_name, modality)***

**Parameters:**

​   ***model_name:*** *str*

​   The model name of ALBEF. Supported model names: 
- albef_4m      
- albef_14m


​   ***modality:*** *str*

​   Which modality(*image* or *text*) is used to generate the embedding. 

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## Interface

An image-text embedding operator takes a [towhee image](link/to/towhee/image/api/doc) or string as input and generate an embedding in ndarray.


**Parameters:**

​	***data:*** *towhee.types.Image (a sub-class of numpy.ndarray)*  or *str*

​  The data (image or text based on specified modality) to generate embedding.	



**Returns:** *numpy.ndarray*

​   The data embedding extracted by model.









# More Resources

- [The guide to instructor-xl | HKU NLP](https://zilliz.com/ai-models/instructor-xl): instructor-xl: an instruction-finetuned model tailored for text embeddings with the best performance when compared to `instructor-base` and `instructor-large.`
- [The guide to text-embedding-ada-002 model  | OpenAI](https://zilliz.com/ai-models/text-embedding-ada-002): text-embedding-ada-002: OpenAI's legacy text embedding model; average price/performance compared to text-embedding-3-large and text-embedding-3-small.
- [The guide to mistral-embed | Mistral AI](https://zilliz.com/ai-models/mistral-embed): mistral-embed: a specialized embedding model for text data with a context window of 8,000 tokens. Optimized for similarity retrieval and RAG applications.
- [Supercharged Semantic Similarity Search in Production - Zilliz blog](https://zilliz.com/learn/supercharged-semantic-similarity-search-in-production): Building a Blazing Fast, Highly Scalable Text-to-Image Search with CLIP embeddings and Milvus, the most advanced open-source vector database.
- [The guide to clip-vit-base-patch32 | OpenAI](https://zilliz.com/ai-models/clip-vit-base-patch32): clip-vit-base-patch32: a CLIP multimodal model variant by OpenAI for image and text embedding.
- [The guide to all-MiniLM-L12-v2 | Hugging Face](https://zilliz.com/ai-models/all-MiniLM-L12-v2): all-MiniLM-L12-v2: a text embedding model ideal for semantic search and RAG and fine-tuned based on Microsoft/MiniLM-L12-H384-uncased
- [Sparse and Dense Embeddings: A Guide for Effective Information Retrieval with Milvus | Zilliz Webinar](https://zilliz.com/event/sparse-and-dense-embeddings-webinar): Zilliz webinar covering what sparse and dense embeddings are and when you'd want to use one over the other.
- [Image Embeddings for Enhanced Image Search - Zilliz blog](https://zilliz.com/learn/image-embeddings-for-enhanced-image-search): Image Embeddings are the core of modern computer vision algorithms. Understand their implementation and use cases and explore different image embedding models.
- [Sparse and Dense Embeddings: A Guide for Effective Information Retrieval with Milvus | Zilliz Webinar](https://zilliz.com/event/sparse-and-dense-embeddings-webinar/success): Zilliz webinar covering what sparse and dense embeddings are and when you'd want to use one over the other.