No Arabic abstract
This report describes our solution for the VATEX Captioning Challenge 2020, which requires generating descriptions for the videos in both English and Chinese languages. We identified three crucial factors that improve the performance, namely: multi-view features, hybrid reward, and diverse ensemble. Based on our method of VATEX 2019 challenge, we achieved significant improvements this year with more advanced model architectures, combination of appearance and motion features, and careful hyper-parameters tuning. Our method achieves very competitive results on both of the Chinese and English video captioning tracks.
Multi-modal information is essential to describe what has happened in a video. In this work, we represent videos by various appearance, motion and audio information guided with video topic. By following multi-stage training strategy, our experiments show steady and significant improvement on the VATEX benchmark. This report presents an overview and comparative analysis of our system designed for both Chinese and English tracks on VATEX Captioning Challenge 2019.
The task of video-based commonsense captioning aims to generate event-wise captions and meanwhile provide multiple commonsense descriptions (e.g., attribute, effect and intention) about the underlying event in the video. Prior works explore the commonsense captions by using separate networks for different commonsense types, which is time-consuming and lacks mining the interaction of different commonsense. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Reasoning Network (HybridNet) to endow the neural networks with the capability of semantic-level reasoning and word-level reasoning. Firstly, we develop multi-commonsense learning for semantic-level reasoning by jointly training different commonsense types in a unified network, which encourages the interaction between the clues of multiple commonsense descriptions, event-wise captions and videos. Then, there are two steps to achieve the word-level reasoning: (1) a memory module records the history predicted sequence from the previous generation processes; (2) a memory-routed multi-head attention (MMHA) module updates the word-level attention maps by incorporating the history information from the memory module into the transformer decoder for word-level reasoning. Moreover, the multimodal features are used to make full use of diverse knowledge for commonsense reasoning. Experiments and abundant analysis on the large-scale Video-to-Commonsense benchmark show that our HybridNet achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other methods.
Existing image captioning models are usually trained by cross-entropy (XE) loss and reinforcement learning (RL), which set ground-truth words as hard targets and force the captioning model to learn from them. However, the widely adopted training strategies suffer from misalignment in XE training and inappropriate reward assignment in RL training. To tackle these problems, we introduce a teacher model that serves as a bridge between the ground-truth caption and the caption model by generating some easier-to-learn word proposals as soft targets. The teacher model is constructed by incorporating the ground-truth image attributes into the baseline caption model. To effectively learn from the teacher model, we propose Teacher-Critical Training Strategies (TCTS) for both XE and RL training to facilitate better learning processes for the caption model. Experimental evaluations of several widely adopted caption models on the benchmark MSCOCO dataset show the proposed TCTS comprehensively enhances most evaluation metrics, especially the Bleu and Rouge-L scores, in both training stages. TCTS is able to achieve to-date the best published single model Bleu-4 and Rouge-L performances of 40.2% and 59.4% on the MSCOCO Karpathy test split. Our codes and pre-trained models will be open-sourced.
Recent advances of video captioning often employ a recurrent neural network (RNN) as the decoder. However, RNN is prone to diluting long-term information. Recent works have demonstrated memory network (MemNet) has the advantage of storing long-term information. However, as the decoder, it has not been well exploited for video captioning. The reason partially comes from the difficulty of sequence decoding with MemNet. Instead of the common practice, i.e., sequence decoding with RNN, in this paper, we devise a novel memory decoder for video captioning. Concretely, after obtaining representation of each frame through a pre-trained network, we first fuse the visual and lexical information. Then, at each time step, we construct a multi-layer MemNet-based decoder, i.e., in each layer, we employ a memory set to store previous information and an attention mechanism to select the information related to the current input. Thus, this decoder avoids the dilution of long-term information. And the multi-layer architecture is helpful for capturing dependencies between frames and word sequences. Experimental results show that even without the encoding network, our decoder still could obtain competitive performance and outperform the performance of RNN decoder. Furthermore, compared with one-layer RNN decoder, our decoder has fewer parameters.
Video captioning has been a challenging and significant task that describes the content of a video clip in a single sentence. The model of video captioning is usually an encoder-decoder. We find that the normalization of extracted video features can improve the final performance of video captioning. Encoder-decoder model is usually trained using teacher-enforced strategies to make the prediction probability of each word close to a 0-1 distribution and ignore other words. In this paper, we present a novel architecture which introduces a guidance module to encourage the encoder-decoder model to generate words related to the past and future words in a caption. Based on the normalization and guidance module, guidance module net (GMNet) is built. Experimental results on commonly used dataset MSVD show that proposed GMNet can improve the performance of the encoder-decoder model on video captioning tasks.