  It is known that the inconsistent distribution and representation of
different modalities, such as image and text, cause the heterogeneity gap that
makes it challenging to correlate such heterogeneous data. Generative
adversarial networks (GANs) have shown its strong ability of modeling data
distribution and learning discriminative representation, existing GANs-based
works mainly focus on generative problem to generate new data. We have
different goal, aim to correlate heterogeneous data, by utilizing the power of
GANs to model cross-modal joint distribution. Thus, we propose Cross-modal GANs
to learn discriminative common representation for bridging heterogeneity gap.
The main contributions are: (1) Cross-modal GANs architecture is proposed to
model joint distribution over data of different modalities. The inter-modality
and intra-modality correlation can be explored simultaneously in generative and
discriminative models. Both of them beat each other to promote cross-modal
correlation learning. (2) Cross-modal convolutional autoencoders with
weight-sharing constraint are proposed to form generative model. They can not
only exploit cross-modal correlation for learning common representation, but
also preserve reconstruction information for capturing semantic consistency
within each modality. (3) Cross-modal adversarial mechanism is proposed, which
utilizes two kinds of discriminative models to simultaneously conduct
intra-modality and inter-modality discrimination. They can mutually boost to
make common representation more discriminative by adversarial training process.
To the best of our knowledge, our proposed CM-GANs approach is the first to
utilize GANs to perform cross-modal common representation learning. Experiments
are conducted to verify the performance of our proposed approach on cross-modal
retrieval paradigm, compared with 10 methods on 3 cross-modal datasets.
