Abstract Several works have proposed to learn a two-path neural network that maps images and texts, respectively, to a same shared Euclidean space where geometry captures useful semantic relationships. Such a multi-modal embedding can be trained and used for various tasks, notably image captioning. In the present work, we introduce a new architecture of this type, with a visual path that leverages recent spaceaware pooling mechanisms. Combined with a textual path which is jointly trained from scratch, our semantic-visual embedding offers a versatile model. Once trained under the supervision of captioned images, it yields new state-of-theart performance on cross-modal retrieval. It also allows the localization of new concepts from the embedding space into any input image, delivering state-of-the-art result on the visual grounding of phrases.