  People can recognize scenes across many different modalities beyond natural
images. In this paper, we investigate how to learn cross-modal scene
representations that transfer across modalities. To study this problem, we
introduce a new cross-modal scene dataset. While convolutional neural networks
can categorize cross-modal scenes well, they also learn an intermediate
representation not aligned across modalities, which is undesirable for
cross-modal transfer applications. We present methods to regularize cross-modal
convolutional neural networks so that they have a shared representation that is
agnostic of the modality. Our experiments suggest that our scene representation
can help transfer representations across modalities for retrieval. Moreover,
our visualizations suggest that units emerge in the shared representation that
tend to activate on consistent concepts independently of the modality.
