Constructing an organized dataset comprised of a large number of images and several captions for each image is a laborious task, which requires vast human effort. On the other hand, collecting a large number of images and sentences separately may be immensely easier. In this paper, we develop a novel data-efficient semi-supervised framework for training an image captioning model. We leverage massive unpaired image and caption data by learning to associate them. To this end, our proposed semi-supervised learning method assigns pseudo-labels to unpaired samples via Generative Adversarial Networks to learn the joint distribution of image and caption. To evaluate, we construct scarcely-paired COCO dataset, a modified version of MS COCO caption dataset. The empirical results show the effectiveness of our method compared to several strong baselines, especially when the amount of the paired samples are scarce.
School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University（武汉大学遥感信息工程学院）
Adversarial learning has shown its advances in generating natural and diverse descriptions in image captioning. However, the learned reward of existing adversarial methods is vague and ill-defined due to the reward ambiguity problem. In this paper, we propose a refined Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning (rAIRL) method to handle the reward ambiguity problem by disentangling reward for each word in a sentence, as well as achieve stable adversarial training by refining the loss function to shift the generator towards Nash equilibrium. In addition, we introduce a conditional term in the lo…
Recently, generative adversarial networks (GAN) have gathered a lot of interest. Their efficiency in generating unseen samples of high quality, especially images, has improved over the years. In the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG), the use of the adversarial setting to generate meaningful sentences has shown to be difficult for two reasons: the lack of existing architectures to produce realistic sentences and the lack of evaluation tools. In this paper, we propose an adversarial architecture related to the conditional GAN (cGAN) that generates sentences according to a given image (a…
We present a novel data-efficient semi-supervised framework to improve the generalization of image captioning models. Constructing a large-scale labeled image captioning dataset is an expensive task in terms of labor, time, and cost. In contrast to manually annotating all the training samples, separately collecting uni-modal datasets is immensely easier, e.g., a large-scale image dataset and a sentence dataset. We leverage such massive unpaired image and caption data upon standard paired data by learning to associate them. To this end, our proposed semi-supervised learning method assigns pseud…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Ningbo University（宁波大学）
Text-based image captioning (TextCap) requires simultaneous comprehension of visual content and reading the text of images to generate a natural language description. Although a task can teach machines to understand the complex human environment further given that text is omnipresent in our daily surroundings, it poses additional challenges in normal captioning. A text-based image intuitively contains abundant and complex multimodal relational content, that is, image details can be described diversely from multiview rather than a single caption. Certainly, we can introduce additional paired tr…
Unsupervised image captioning with no annotations is an emerging challenge in computer vision, where the existing arts usually adopt GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks) models. In this paper, we propose a novel memory-based network rather than GAN, named Recurrent Relational Memory Network ($R^2M$). Unlike complicated and sensitive adversarial learning that non-ideally performs for long sentence generation, $R^2M$ implements a concepts-to-sentence memory translator through two-stage memory mechanisms: fusion and recurrent memories, correlating the relational reasoning between common visual c…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
While significant progress has been made in the image captioning task, video description is still in its infancy due to the complex nature of video data. Generating multi-sentence descriptions for long videos is even more challenging. Among the main issues are the fluency and coherence of the generated descriptions, and their relevance to the video. Recently, reinforcement and adversarial learning based methods have been explored to improve the image captioning models; however, both types of methods suffer from a number of issues, e.g. poor readability and high redundancy for RL and stability …
While most image captioning aims to generate objective descriptions of images, the last few years have seen work on generating visually grounded image captions which have a specific style (e.g., incorporating positive or negative sentiment). However, because the stylistic component is typically the last part of training, current models usually pay more attention to the style at the expense of accurate content description. In addition, there is a lack of variability in terms of the stylistic aspects. To address these issues, we propose an image captioning model called ATTEND-GAN which has two c…
In this paper we study image captioning as a conditional GAN training, proposing both a context-aware LSTM captioner and co-attentive discriminator, which enforces semantic alignment between images and captions. We empirically focus on the viability of two training methods: Self-critical Sequence Training (SCST) and Gumbel Straight-Through (ST) and demonstrate that SCST shows more stable gradient behavior and improved results over Gumbel ST, even without accessing discriminator gradients directly. We also address the problem of automatic evaluation for captioning models and introduce a new sem…
Focusing on text-to-image (T2I) generation, we propose Text and Image Mutual-Translation Adversarial Networks (TIME), a lightweight but effective model that jointly learns a T2I generator G and an image captioning discriminator D under the Generative Adversarial Network framework. While previous methods tackle the T2I problem as a uni-directional task and use pre-trained language models to enforce the image--text consistency, TIME requires neither extra modules nor pre-training. We show that the performance of G can be boosted substantially by training it jointly with D as a language model. Sp…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；UC Berkeley EECS（加州大学伯克利分校电气工程与计算机科学系）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook 人工智能研究院）
While strong progress has been made in image captioning over the last years, machine and human captions are still quite distinct. A closer look reveals that this is due to the deficiencies in the generated word distribution, vocabulary size, and strong bias in the generators towards frequent captions. Furthermore, humans -- rightfully so -- generate multiple, diverse captions, due to the inherent ambiguity in the captioning task which is not considered in today's systems. To address these challenges, we change the training objective of the caption generator from reproducing groundtruth caption…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are machine learning methods that are used in many important and novel applications. For example, in imaging science, GANs are effectively utilized in generating image datasets, photographs of human faces, image and video captioning, image-to-image translation, text-to-image translation, video prediction, and 3D object generation to name a few. In this paper, we discuss how GANs can be used to create an artificial world. More specifically, we discuss how GANs help to describe an image utilizing image/video captioning methods and how to translate the image…
Exo2EgoDVC: Dense Video Captioning of Egocentric Procedural Activities Using Web Instructional Videos
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；OMRON SINIC X Corp.（欧姆龙SINIC X公司）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（日本产业技术综合研究所）；LY Corporation（LY公司）
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Meta AI
Image captioning is a longstanding problem in the field of computer vision and natural language processing. To date, researchers have produced impressive state-of-the-art performance in the age of deep learning. Most of these state-of-the-art, however, requires large volume of annotated image-caption pairs in order to train their models. When given an image dataset of interests, practitioner needs to annotate the caption for each image in the training set and this process needs to happen for each newly collected image dataset. In this paper, we explore the task of unsupervised image captioning…
We study the problem of grounding distributional representations of texts on the visual domain, namely visual-semantic embeddings (VSE for short). Begin with an insightful adversarial attack on VSE embeddings, we show the limitation of current frameworks and image-text datasets (e.g., MS-COCO) both quantitatively and qualitatively. The large gap between the number of possible constitutions of real-world semantics and the size of parallel data, to a large extent, restricts the model to establish the link between textual semantics and visual concepts. We alleviate this problem by augmenting the …
Institute of Advanced Artificial Intelligence in Nanjing（南京高级人工智能研究院）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）
Automatically generating the descriptions of an image, i.e., image captioning, is an important and fundamental topic in artificial intelligence, which bridges the gap between computer vision and natural language processing. Based on the successful deep learning models, especially the CNN model and Long Short-Term Memories (LSTMs) with attention mechanism, we propose a hierarchical attention model by utilizing both of the global CNN features and the local object features for more effective feature representation and reasoning in image captioning. The generative adversarial network (GAN), togeth…
Automatically describing video content with text description is challenging but important task, which has been attracting a lot of attention in computer vision community. Previous works mainly strive for the accuracy of the generated sentences, while ignoring the sentences diversity, which is inconsistent with human behavior. In this paper, we aim to caption each video with multiple descriptions and propose a novel framework. Concretely, for a given video, the intermediate latent variables of conventional encode-decode process are utilized as input to the conditional generative adversarial net…
Text-to-Image translation has been an active area of research in the recent past. The ability for a network to learn the meaning of a sentence and generate an accurate image that depicts the sentence shows ability of the model to think more like humans. Popular methods on text to image translation make use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate high quality images based on text input, but the generated images don't always reflect the meaning of the sentence given to the model as input. We address this issue by using a captioning network to caption on generated images and exploit…
MIT（麻省理工学院）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）；UC Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Visual language grounding is widely studied in modern neural image captioning systems, which typically adopts an encoder-decoder framework consisting of two principal components: a convolutional neural network (CNN) for image feature extraction and a recurrent neural network (RNN) for language caption generation. To study the robustness of language grounding to adversarial perturbations in machine vision and perception, we propose Show-and-Fool, a novel algorithm for crafting adversarial examples in neural image captioning. The proposed algorithm provides two evaluation approaches, which check…
Computational Biomedicine Lab（计算生物医学实验室）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）
For many computer vision applications such as image captioning, visual question answering, and person search, learning discriminative feature representations at both image and text level is an essential yet challenging problem. Its challenges originate from the large word variance in the text domain as well as the difficulty of accurately measuring the distance between the features of the two modalities. Most prior work focuses on the latter challenge, by introducing loss functions that help the network learn better feature representations but fail to account for the complexity of the textual …
Generating novel pairs of image and text is a problem that combines computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we present strategies for generating novel image and caption pairs based on existing captioning datasets. The model takes advantage of recent advances in generative adversarial networks and sequence-to-sequence modeling. We make generalizations to generate paired samples from multiple domains. Furthermore, we study cycles -- generating from image to text then back to image and vise versa, as well as its connection with autoencoders.
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
In this work, we study the robustness of a CNN+RNN based image captioning system being subjected to adversarial noises. We propose to fool an image captioning system to generate some targeted partial captions for an image polluted by adversarial noises, even the targeted captions are totally irrelevant to the image content. A partial caption indicates that the words at some locations in this caption are observed, while words at other locations are not restricted.It is the first work to study exact adversarial attacks of targeted partial captions. Due to the sequential dependencies among words …
Data Science Institute, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院数据科学研究所）
Translating information between text and image is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence that connects natural language processing and computer vision. In the past few years, performance in image caption generation has seen significant improvement through the adoption of recurrent neural networks (RNN). Meanwhile, text-to-image generation begun to generate plausible images using datasets of specific categories like birds and flowers. We've even seen image generation from multi-category datasets such as the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MSCOCO) through the use of generative adv…
Mainstream deep models for three-dimensional MRI synthesis are either cross-sectional or volumetric depending on the input. Cross-sectional models can decrease the model complexity, but they may lead to discontinuity artifacts. On the other hand, volumetric models can alleviate the discontinuity artifacts, but they might suffer from loss of spatial resolution due to increased model complexity coupled with scarce training data. To mitigate the limitations of both approaches, we propose a novel model that progressively recovers the target volume via simpler synthesis tasks across individual orie…
In this paper, we propose a novel conditional-generative-adversarial-nets-based image captioning framework as an extension of traditional reinforcement-learning (RL)-based encoder-decoder architecture. To deal with the inconsistent evaluation problem among different objective language metrics, we are motivated to design some "discriminator" networks to automatically and progressively determine whether generated caption is human described or machine generated. Two kinds of discriminator architectures (CNN and RNN-based structures) are introduced since each has its own advantages. The proposed a…
Compensating scarce measurements by inferring them from computational models is a way to address ill-posed inverse problems. We tackle Limited Angle Tomography by completing the set of acquisitions using a generative model and prior-knowledge about the scanned object. Using a Generative Adversarial Network as model and Computer-Assisted Design data as shape prior, we demonstrate a quantitative and qualitative advantage of our technique over other state-of-the-art methods. Inferring a substantial number of consecutive missing measurements, we offer an alternative to other image inpainting techn…
Digital Aviation Research Technology Centre (DARTeC), Cranfield University（克兰菲尔德大学数字航空研究技术中心（DARTeC））；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Increased drone proliferation in civilian and professional settings has created new threat vectors for airports and national infrastructures. The economic damage for a single major airport from drone incursions is estimated to be millions per day. Due to the lack of diverse drone training data, accurate training of deep learning detection algorithms under scarce data is an open challenge. Existing methods largely rely on collecting diverse and comprehensive experimental drone footage data, artificially induced data augmentation, transfer and meta-learning, as well as physics-informed learning.…
Currently there is strong interest in data-driven approaches to medical image classification. However, medical imaging data is scarce, expensive, and fraught with legal concerns regarding patient privacy. Typical consent forms only allow for patient data to be used in medical journals or education, meaning the majority of medical data is inaccessible for general public research. We propose a novel, two-stage pipeline for generating synthetic medical images from a pair of generative adversarial networks, tested in practice on retinal fundi images. We develop a hierarchical generation process to…
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Khoury College of Computer Science, Northeastern University（东北大学库里计算机科学学院）
The recent flourish of deep learning in various tasks is largely accredited to the rich and accessible labeled data. Nonetheless, massive supervision remains a luxury for many real applications, boosting great interest in label-scarce techniques such as few-shot learning (FSL), which aims to learn concept of new classes with a few labeled samples. A natural approach to FSL is data augmentation and many recent works have proved the feasibility by proposing various data synthesis models. However, these models fail to well secure the discriminability and diversity of the synthesized data and thus…
AICAttack: Adversarial Image Captioning Attack with Attention-Based Optimization
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；School of Computer Science（计算机学院）；City University of Macau（澳门城市大学）；Faculty of Data Science（数据科学学院）；Shandong University（山东大学）；School of Software（软件学院）
The generation of synthetic images is currently being dominated by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Despite their outstanding success in generating realistic looking images, they still suffer from major drawbacks, including an unstable and highly sensitive training procedure, mode-collapse and mode-mixture, and dependency on large training sets. In this work we present a novel non-adversarial generative method - Clustered Optimization of LAtent space (COLA), which overcomes some of the limitations of GANs, and outperforms GANs when training data is scarce. In the full data regime, our m…
SAP SE（SAP公司）；Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）
State-of-the-art deep learning algorithms yield remarkable results in many visual recognition tasks. However, they still fail to provide satisfactory results in scarce data regimes. To a certain extent this lack of data can be compensated by multimodal information. Missing information in one modality of a single data point (e.g. an image) can be made up for in another modality (e.g. a textual description). Therefore, we design a few-shot learning task that is multimodal during training (i.e. image and text) and single-modal during test time (i.e. image). In this regard, we propose a self-paced…
Arterys Inc.（Arterys公司）；University of Groningen, University Medical Center Groningen（格罗宁根大学格罗宁根大学医学中心）
Medical images with specific pathologies are scarce, but a large amount of data is usually required for a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) to achieve good accuracy. We consider the problem of segmenting the left ventricular (LV) myocardium on late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) scans of which only some of the scans have scar tissue. We propose ScarGAN to simulate scar tissue on healthy myocardium using chained generative adversarial networks (GAN). Our novel approach factorizes the simulation process into 3 steps: 1) a mask generator to simulate th…
Automated captioning of photos is a mission that incorporates the difficulties of photo analysis and text generation. One essential feature of captioning is the concept of attention: how to determine what to specify and in which sequence. In this study, we leverage the Object Relation using adversarial robust cut algorithm, that grows upon this method by specifically embedding knowledge about the spatial association between input data through graph representation. Our experimental study represent the promising performance of our proposed method for image captioning.
College of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机与软件学院）
Machine learning models trained in one domain perform poorly in the other domains due to the existence of domain shift. Domain adaptation techniques solve this problem by training transferable models from the label-rich source domain to the label-scarce target domain. Unfortunately, a majority of the existing domain adaptation techniques rely on the availability of target-domain data, and thus limit their applications to a small community across few computer vision problems. In this paper, we tackle the challenging zero-shot domain adaptation (ZSDA) problem, where target-domain data is non-ava…
Image captioning systems have made substantial progress, largely due to the availability of curated datasets like Microsoft COCO or Vizwiz that have accurate descriptions of their corresponding images. Unfortunately, scarce availability of such cleanly labeled data results in trained algorithms producing captions that can be terse and idiosyncratically specific to details in the image. We propose a new technique, cooperative distillation that combines clean curated datasets with the web-scale automatically extracted captions of the Google Conceptual Captions dataset (GCC), which can have poor …
University of Western Australia（西澳大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
Deep learning is found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. However, its adversarial susceptibility in image caption generation is under-explored. We study adversarial examples for vision and language models, which typically adopt an encoder-decoder framework consisting of two major components: a Convolutional Neural Network (i.e., CNN) for image feature extraction and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for caption generation. In particular, we investigate attacks on the visual encoder's hidden layer that is fed to the subsequent recurrent network. The existing methods either attack the cla…
In recent years, there is a growing number of pre-trained models trained on a large corpus of data and yielding good performance on various tasks such as classifying multimodal datasets. These models have shown good performance on natural images but are not fully explored for scarce abstract concepts in images. In this work, we introduce an image/text-based dataset called Greeting Cards. Dataset (GCD) that has abstract visual concepts. In our work, we propose to aggregate features from pretrained images and text embeddings to learn abstract visual concepts from GCD. This allows us to learn the…
Image Captioning is a task that combines computer vision and natural language processing, where it aims to generate descriptive legends for images. It is a two-fold process relying on accurate image understanding and correct language understanding both syntactically and semantically. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest research and findings in the field of image captioning due to the growing amount of knowledge available on the topic. There is not, however, enough coverage of those findings in the available review papers. We perform in this paper a run-through of t…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；The Cyprus Institute（塞浦路斯研究所）
Over the past few years, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have garnered increased interest among researchers in Computer Vision, with applications including, but not limited to, image generation, translation, imputation, and super-resolution. Nevertheless, no GAN-based method has been proposed in the literature that can successfully represent, generate or translate 3D facial shapes (meshes). This can be primarily attributed to two facts, namely that (a) publicly available 3D face databases are scarce as well as limited in terms of sample size and variability (e.g., few subjects, little d…
University of Catania（卡塔尼亚大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
Human behavior understanding in videos is a complex, still unsolved problem and requires to accurately model motion at both the local (pixel-wise dense prediction) and global (aggregation of motion cues) levels. Current approaches based on supervised learning require large amounts of annotated data, whose scarce availability is one of the main limiting factors to the development of general solutions. Unsupervised learning can instead leverage the vast amount of videos available on the web and it is a promising solution for overcoming the existing limitations. In this paper, we propose an adver…
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Anhui University（安徽大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Unpaired Image Captioning (UIC) has been developed to learn image descriptions from unaligned vision-language sample pairs. Existing works usually tackle this task using adversarial learning and visual concept reward based on reinforcement learning. However, these existing works were only able to learn limited cross-domain information in vision and language domains, which restrains the captioning performance of UIC. Inspired by the success of Vision-Language Pre-Trained Models (VL-PTMs) in this research, we attempt to infer the cross-domain cue information about a given image from the large VL…
Adversarial Masking Contrastive Learning for vein recognition
Chongqing Technology and Business University（重庆工商大学）；Telecom SudParis（巴黎电信学院）；University Paris-Saclay（巴黎-萨克雷大学）；China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）
At present, adversarial attacks are designed in a task-specific fashion. However, for downstream computer vision tasks such as image captioning, image segmentation etc., the current deep learning systems use an image classifier like VGG16, ResNet50, Inception-v3 etc. as a feature extractor. Keeping this in mind, we propose Mimic and Fool, a task agnostic adversarial attack. Given a feature extractor, the proposed attack finds an adversarial image which can mimic the image feature of the original image. This ensures that the two images give the same (or similar) output regardless of the task. W…
Exploiting learning algorithms under scarce data regimes is a limitation and a reality of the medical imaging field. In an attempt to mitigate the problem, we propose a data augmentation protocol based on generative adversarial networks. We condition the networks at a pixel-level (segmentation mask) and at a global-level information (acquisition environment or lesion type). Such conditioning provides immediate access to the image-label pairs while controlling global class specific appearance of the synthesized images. To stimulate synthesis of the features relevant for the segmentation task, a…
Proportional Sensitivity in Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-Augmented Brain Tumor Classification Using Convolutional Neural Network
American International University-Bangladesh（美国国际大学-孟加拉国）；Asian University of Bangladesh（孟加拉国亚洲大学）；Information and Computer Science Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM)（石油和矿物大学（KFUPM）信息与计算机科学系）；SDAIA-KFUPM Joint Research Center for AI, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（人工智能联合研究中心（SDAIA-KFUPM）, 石油和矿物大学）；Interdisciplinary Research Center for Bio Systems and Machines, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（生物系统与机器交叉研究中心，石油和矿物大学）；Independent University, Bangladesh（独立大学）
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Understanding images without explicit supervision has become an important problem in computer vision. In this paper, we address image captioning by generating language descriptions of scenes without learning from annotated pairs of images and their captions. The core component of our approach is a shared latent space that is structured by visual concepts. In this space, the two modalities should be indistinguishable. A language model is first trained to encode sentences into semantically structured embeddings. Image features that are translated into this embedding space can be decoded into des…
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Image captioning is an ambiguous problem, with many suitable captions for an image. To address ambiguity, beam search is the de facto method for sampling multiple captions. However, beam search is computationally expensive and known to produce generic captions. To address this concern, some variational auto-encoder (VAE) and generative adversarial net (GAN) based methods have been proposed. Though diverse, GAN and VAE are less accurate. In this paper, we first predict a meaningful summary of the image, then generate the caption based on that summary. We use part-of-speech as summaries, since o…
Image description generation plays an important role in many real-world applications, such as image retrieval, automatic navigation, and disabled people support. A well-developed task of image description generation is image captioning, which usually generates a short captioning sentence and thus neglects many of fine-grained properties, e.g., the information of subtle objects and their relationships. In this paper, we study the visual paragraph generation, which can describe the image with a long paragraph containing rich details. Previous research often generates the paragraph via a hierarch…
