  Large Vision & Language models pretrained on web-scale data provide
representations that are invaluable for numerous V&L problems. However, it is
unclear how they can be used for reasoning about user-specific visual concepts
in unstructured language. This problem arises in multiple domains, from
personalized image retrieval to personalized interaction with smart devices. We
introduce a new learning setup called Personalized Vision & Language (PerVL)
with two new benchmark datasets for retrieving and segmenting user-specific
"personalized" concepts "in the wild". In PerVL, one should learn personalized
concepts (1) independently of the downstream task (2) allowing a pretrained
model to reason about them with free language, and (3) does not require
personalized negative examples. We propose an architecture for solving PerVL
that operates by extending the input vocabulary of a pretrained model with new
word embeddings for the new personalized concepts. The model can then reason
about them by simply using them in a sentence. We demonstrate that our approach
learns personalized visual concepts from a few examples and can effectively
apply them in image retrieval and semantic segmentation using rich textual
queries.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Machine Learning