No Arabic abstract
The existing image captioning approaches typically train a one-stage sentence decoder, which is difficult to generate rich fine-grained descriptions. On the other hand, multi-stage image caption model is hard to train due to the vanishing gradient problem. In this paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine multi-stage prediction framework for image captioning, composed of multiple decoders each of which operates on the output of the previous stage, producing increasingly refined image descriptions. Our proposed learning approach addresses the difficulty of vanishing gradients during training by providing a learning objective function that enforces intermediate supervisions. Particularly, we optimize our model with a reinforcement learning approach which utilizes the output of each intermediate decoders test-time inference algorithm as well as the output of its preceding decoder to normalize the rewards, which simultaneously solves the well-known exposure bias problem and the loss-evaluation mismatch problem. We extensively evaluate the proposed approach on MSCOCO and show that our approach can achieve the state-of-the-art performance.
Significant progress has been made in recent years in image captioning, an active topic in the fields of vision and language. However, existing methods tend to yield overly general captions and consist of some of the most frequent words/phrases, resulting in inaccurate and indistinguishable descriptions (see Figure 1). This is primarily due to (i) the conservative characteristic of traditional training objectives that drives the model to generate correct but hardly discriminative captions for similar images and (ii) the uneven word distribution of the ground-truth captions, which encourages generating highly frequent words/phrases while suppressing the less frequent but more concrete ones. In this work, we propose a novel global-local discriminative objective that is formulated on top of a reference model to facilitate generating fine-grained descriptive captions. Specifically, from a global perspective, we design a novel global discriminative constraint that pulls the generated sentence to better discern the corresponding image from all others in the entire dataset. From the local perspective, a local discriminative constraint is proposed to increase attention such that it emphasizes the less frequent but more concrete words/phrases, thus facilitating the generation of captions that better describe the visual details of the given images. We evaluate the proposed method on the widely used MS-COCO dataset, where it outperforms the baseline methods by a sizable margin and achieves competitive performance over existing leading approaches. We also conduct self-retrieval experiments to demonstrate the discriminability of the proposed method.
Recently it has shown that the policy-gradient methods for reinforcement learning have been utilized to train deep end-to-end systems on natural language processing tasks. Whats more, with the complexity of understanding image content and diverse ways of describing image content in natural language, image captioning has been a challenging problem to deal with. To the best of our knowledge, most state-of-the-art methods follow a pattern of sequential model, such as recurrent neural networks (RNN). However, in this paper, we propose a novel architecture for image captioning with deep reinforcement learning to optimize image captioning tasks. We utilize two networks called policy network and value network to collaboratively generate the captions of images. The experiments are conducted on Microsoft COCO dataset, and the experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Automatic captioning of images is a task that combines the challenges of image analysis and text generation. One important aspect in captioning is the notion of attention: How to decide what to describe and in which order. Inspired by the successes in text analysis and translation, previous work have proposed the textit{transformer} architecture for image captioning. However, the structure between the textit{semantic units} in images (usually the detected regions from object detection model) and sentences (each single word) is different. Limited work has been done to adapt the transformers internal architecture to images. In this work, we introduce the textbf{textit{image transformer}}, which consists of a modified encoding transformer and an implicit decoding transformer, motivated by the relative spatial relationship between image regions. Our design widen the original transformer layers inner architecture to adapt to the structure of images. With only regions feature as inputs, our model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both MSCOCO offline and online testing benchmarks.
The last decade has witnessed remarkable progress in the image captioning task; however, most existing methods cannot control their captions, emph{e.g.}, choosing to describe the image either roughly or in detail. In this paper, we propose to use a simple length level embedding to endow them with this ability. Moreover, due to their autoregressive nature, the computational complexity of existing models increases linearly as the length of the generated captions grows. Thus, we further devise a non-autoregressive image captioning approach that can generate captions in a length-irrelevant complexity. We verify the merit of the proposed length level embedding on three models: two state-of-the-art (SOTA) autoregressive models with different types of decoder, as well as our proposed non-autoregressive model, to show its generalization ability. In the experiments, our length-controllable image captioning models not only achieve SOTA performance on the challenging MS COCO dataset but also generate length-controllable and diverse image captions. Specifically, our non-autoregressive model outperforms the autoregressive baselines in terms of controllability and diversity, and also significantly improves the decoding efficiency for long captions. Our code and models are released at textcolor{magenta}{texttt{https://github.com/bearcatt/LaBERT}}.
State-of-the-art image captioning methods mostly focus on improving visual features, less attention has been paid to utilizing the inherent properties of language to boost captioning performance. In this paper, we show that vocabulary coherence between words and syntactic paradigm of sentences are also important to generate high-quality image caption. Following the conventional encoder-decoder framework, we propose the Reflective Decoding Network (RDN) for image captioning, which enhances both the long-sequence dependency and position perception of words in a caption decoder. Our model learns to collaboratively attend on both visual and textual features and meanwhile perceive each words relative position in the sentence to maximize the information delivered in the generated caption. We evaluate the effectiveness of our RDN on the COCO image captioning datasets and achieve superior performance over the previous methods. Further experiments reveal that our approach is particularly advantageous for hard cases with complex scenes to describe by captions.