CrispSearch: low-latency on-device language-based image retrieval

Advances in deep learning have enabled accurate language-based search and retrieval, e.g., over user photos, in the cloud. Many users prefer to store their photos in the home due to privacy concerns. As such, a need arises for models that can perform cross-modal search on resource-limited devices. State-of-the-art cross-modal retrieval models achieve high accuracy through learning entangled representations that enable fine-grained similarity calculation between a language query and an image, but at the expense of having a prohibitively high retrieval latency. Alternatively, there is a new class of methods that exhibits good performance with low latency, but requires a lot more computational resources, and an order of magnitude more training data (i.e. large web-scraped datasets consisting of millions of image-caption pairs) making them infeasible to use in a commercial context. From a pragmatic perspective, none of the existing methods are suitable for developing commercial applications for low-latency cross-modal retrieval on low-resource devices. We propose CrispSearch, a cascaded approach that greatly reduces the retrieval latency with minimal loss in ranking accuracy for on-device language-based image retrieval. The idea behind our approach is to combine a light-weight and runtime-efficient coarse model with a fine re-ranking stage. Given a language query, the coarse model effectively filters out many of the irrelevant image candidates. After this filtering, only a handful of strong candidates will be selected and sent to a fine model for re-ranking. Extensive experimental results with two SOTA models for the fine re-ranking stage, on two standard benchmark datasets (namely, MSCOCO and Flickr30k) show that CrispSearch results in a speedup of up to 38 times over the SOTA fine methods with negligible performance degradation. Moreover, our method does not require millions of training instances, making it a pragmatic solution to on-device search and retrieval.