  The heterogeneity-gap between different modalities brings a significant
challenge to multimedia information retrieval. Some studies formalize the
cross-modal retrieval tasks as a ranking problem and learn a shared multi-modal
embedding space to measure the cross-modality similarity. However, previous
methods often establish the shared embedding space based on linear mapping
functions which might not be sophisticated enough to reveal more complicated
inter-modal correspondences. Additionally, current studies assume that the
rankings are of equal importance, and thus all rankings are used
simultaneously, or a small number of rankings are selected randomly to train
the embedding space at each iteration. Such strategies, however, always suffer
from outliers as well as reduced generalization capability due to their lack of
insightful understanding of procedure of human cognition. In this paper, we
involve the self-paced learning theory with diversity into the cross-modal
learning to rank and learn an optimal multi-modal embedding space based on
non-linear mapping functions. This strategy enhances the model's robustness to
outliers and achieves better generalization via training the model gradually
from easy rankings by diverse queries to more complex ones. An efficient
alternative algorithm is exploited to solve the proposed challenging problem
with fast convergence in practice. Extensive experimental results on several
benchmark datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves significant
improvements over the state-of-the-arts in this literature.
