Interactive Multimodal Learning on 100 Million Images

This paper presents Blackthorn, an efficient interactive multimodal learning approach facilitating analysis of multimedia collections of 100 million items on a single high-end workstation. This is achieved by efficient data compression and optimizations to the interactive learning process. The compressed i-I64 data representation costs tens of bytes per item yet preserves most of the visual and textual semantic information. The optimized interactive learning model scores the i-I64-compressed data directly, greatly reducing the computational requirements. The experiments show that Blackthorn is up to 105x faster than the conventional relevance feedback baseline. Blackthorn is shown to vastly outperform the baseline with respect to recall over time. Blackthorn reaches up to 92% of the precision achieved by the baseline, validating the efficacy of the i-I64 representation. On the YFCC100M dataset, Blackthorn performes one complete interaction round in 0.7 seconds. Blackthorn thus opens multimedia collections comprising 100 million items to learning-based analysis in fully interactive time.