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}}.
ADAPT Research Centre（ADAPT研究中心）；Technological University Dublin（都柏林理工大学）
Controllable Image Captioning is a recent sub-field in the multi-modal task of Image Captioning wherein constraints are placed on which regions in an image should be described in the generated natural language caption. This puts a stronger focus on producing more detailed descriptions, and opens the door for more end-user control over results. A vital component of the Controllable Image Captioning architecture is the mechanism that decides the timing of attending to each region through the advancement of a region pointer. In this paper, we propose a novel method for predicting the timing of re…
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Meituan（美团）
In this paper, we investigate a novel and challenging task, namely controllable video captioning with an exemplar sentence. Formally, given a video and a syntactically valid exemplar sentence, the task aims to generate one caption which not only describes the semantic contents of the video, but also follows the syntactic form of the given exemplar sentence. In order to tackle such an exemplar-based video captioning task, we propose a novel Syntax Modulated Caption Generator (SMCG) incorporated in an encoder-decoder-reconstructor architecture. The proposed SMCG takes video semantic representati…
Controllable Image Captioning with Prompt-Conditioned Scene Rewards
POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence, POSTECH（浦项科技大学人工智能研究生院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, POSTECH（浦项科技大学计算机科学与工程系）
Video captioning combines video understanding and language generation. Different from image captioning that describes a static image with details of almost every object, video captioning usually considers a sequence of frames and biases towards focused objects, e.g., the objects that stay in focus regardless of the changing background. Therefore, detecting and properly accommodating focused objects is critical in video captioning. To enforce the description of focused objects and achieve controllable video captioning, we propose an Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive approach (O2NA), which perf…
Despite the remarkable progress of image captioning, existing captioners typically lack the controllable capability to generate desired image captions, e.g., describing the image in a rough or detailed manner, in a factual or emotional view, etc. In this paper, we show that a unified model is qualified to perform well in diverse domains and freely switch among multiple styles. Such a controllable capability is achieved by embedding the prompt learning into the image captioning framework. To be specific, we design a set of prompts to fine-tune the pre-trained image captioner. These prompts allo…
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Current captioning approaches can describe images using black-box architectures whose behavior is hardly controllable and explainable from the exterior. As an image can be described in infinite ways depending on the goal and the context at hand, a higher degree of controllability is needed to apply captioning algorithms in complex scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for image captioning which can generate diverse descriptions by allowing both grounding and controllability. Given a control signal in the form of a sequence or set of image regions, we generate the correspondi…
Zero-shot capability has been considered as a new revolution of deep learning, letting machines work on tasks without curated training data. As a good start and the only existing outcome of zero-shot image captioning (IC), ZeroCap abandons supervised training and sequentially searches every word in the caption using the knowledge of large-scale pretrained models. Though effective, its autoregressive generation and gradient-directed searching mechanism limit the diversity of captions and inference speed, respectively. Moreover, ZeroCap does not consider the controllability issue of zero-shot IC…
Shandong University（山东大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
In this paper, we propose to guide the video caption generation with Part-of-Speech (POS) information, based on a gated fusion of multiple representations of input videos. We construct a novel gated fusion network, with one particularly designed cross-gating (CG) block, to effectively encode and fuse different types of representations, e.g., the motion and content features of an input video. One POS sequence generator relies on this fused representation to predict the global syntactic structure, which is thereafter leveraged to guide the video captioning generation and control the syntax of th…
We develop and evaluate captioning models that allow control of caption length. Our models can leverage this control to generate captions of different style and descriptiveness.
State-of-the-art image captioners can generate accurate sentences to describe images in a sequence to sequence manner without considering the controllability and interpretability. This, however, is far from making image captioning widely used as an image can be interpreted in infinite ways depending on the target and the context at hand. Achieving controllability is important especially when the image captioner is used by different people with different way of interpreting the images. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for image captioning which can generate diverse descriptions by …
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
The Controllable Image Captioning (CIC) task aims to generate captions conditioned on designated control signals. Several structure-related control signals are proposed to control the semantic structure of sentences, such as sentence length and Part-of-Speech tag sequences. However, due to the fact that the accuracy-based reward focuses mainly on contents rather than semantic structures, existing reinforcement training methods are not applicable to structure-related CIC models. The lack of reinforcement training leads to exposure bias and the inconsistency between the optimizing function and e…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Tencent Data Platform（腾讯数据平台）
Controllable Image Captioning (CIC) -- generating image descriptions following designated control signals -- has received unprecedented attention over the last few years. To emulate the human ability in controlling caption generation, current CIC studies focus exclusively on control signals concerning objective properties, such as contents of interest or descriptive patterns. However, we argue that almost all existing objective control signals have overlooked two indispensable characteristics of an ideal control signal: 1) Event-compatible: all visual contents referred to in a single sentence …
IntentVCNet: Bridging Spatio-Temporal Gaps for Intention-Oriented Controllable Video Captioning
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hefei Institutes of Physical Science,Chinese Academy of Sciences（合肥物理研究所，中国科学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（人工智能研究所，合肥综合性国家科学中心）；State Key Lab. for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（新型软件技术国家重点实验室，南京大学）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
We address the challenging problem of image captioning by revisiting the representation of image scene graph. At the core of our method lies the decomposition of a scene graph into a set of sub-graphs, with each sub-graph capturing a semantic component of the input image. We design a deep model to select important sub-graphs, and to decode each selected sub-graph into a single target sentence. By using sub-graphs, our model is able to attend to different components of the image. Our method thus accounts for accurate, diverse, grounded and controllable captioning at the same time. We present ex…
Training large-scale image captioning (IC) models demands access to a rich and diverse set of training examples, gathered from the wild, often from noisy alt-text data. However, recent modeling approaches to IC often fall short in terms of performance in this case, because they assume a clean annotated dataset (as opposed to the noisier alt-text--based annotations), and employ an end-to-end generation approach, which often lacks both controllability and interpretability. We address these problems by breaking down the task into two simpler, more controllable tasks -- skeleton prediction and ske…
Standard image captioning tasks such as COCO and Flickr30k are factual, neutral in tone and (to a human) state the obvious (e.g., "a man playing a guitar"). While such tasks are useful to verify that a machine understands the content of an image, they are not engaging to humans as captions. With this in mind we define a new task, Personality-Captions, where the goal is to be as engaging to humans as possible by incorporating controllable style and personality traits. We collect and release a large dataset of 201,858 of such captions conditioned over 215 possible traits. We build models that co…
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Most recent state of the art architectures rely on combinations and variations of three approaches: convolutional, recurrent and self-attentive methods. Our work attempts in laying the basis for a new research direction for sequence modeling based upon the idea of modifying the sequence length. In order to do that, we propose a new method called "Expansion Mechanism" which transforms either dynamically or statically the input sequence into a new one featuring a different sequence length. Furthermore, we introduce a novel architecture that exploits such method and achieves competitive performan…
We use coherence relations inspired by computational models of discourse to study the information needs and goals of image captioning. Using an annotation protocol specifically devised for capturing image--caption coherence relations, we annotate 10,000 instances from publicly-available image--caption pairs. We introduce a new task for learning inferences in imagery and text, coherence relation prediction, and show that these coherence annotations can be exploited to learn relation classifiers as an intermediary step, and also train coherence-aware, controllable image captioning models. The re…
TTIDA: Controllable Generative Data Augmentation via Text-to-Text and Text-to-Image Models
University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
ABMAMBA: Multimodal Large Language Model with Aligned Hierarchical Bidirectional Scan for Efficient Video Captioning
Keio University（庆应义塾大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；National Institute of Informatics Research and Development Center for Large Language Models（国立信息学研究所大型语言模型研发中心）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Samsung Research China（三星中国研究院）
Given the features of a video, recurrent neural networks can be used to automatically generate a caption for the video. Existing methods for video captioning have at least three limitations. First, semantic information has been widely applied to boost the performance of video captioning models, but existing networks often fail to provide meaningful semantic features. Second, the Teacher Forcing algorithm is often utilized to optimize video captioning models, but during training and inference, different strategies are applied to guide word generation, leading to poor performance. Third, current…
Video captioning works on the two fundamental concepts, feature detection and feature composition. While modern day transformers are beneficial in composing features, they lack the fundamental problems of selecting and understanding of the contents. As the feature length increases, it becomes increasingly important to include provisions for improved capturing of the pertinent contents. In this work, we have introduced a new concept of Self-Aware Composition Transformer (SACT) that is capable of generating Multinomial Attention (MultAtt) which is a way of generating distributions of various com…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Tencent AI LAB（腾讯AI实验室）
Although end-to-end (E2E) learning has led to impressive progress on a variety of visual understanding tasks, it is often impeded by hardware constraints (e.g., GPU memory) and is prone to overfitting. When it comes to video captioning, one of the most challenging benchmark tasks in computer vision, those limitations of E2E learning are especially amplified by the fact that both the input videos and output captions are lengthy sequences. Indeed, state-of-the-art methods for video captioning process video frames by convolutional neural networks and generate captions by unrolling recurrent neura…
Regional Attention-Enhanced Swin Transformer for Clinically Relevant Medical Image Captioning
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电子工程与计算机科学）；Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（全州科学技术研究院）；Electrical and Computer Engineering Department（电子与计算机工程系）；Chonnam National University（全南国立大学）；AI Convergence Department（人工智能融合部门）；Department of Information Systems, CCSIT（信息系统系，CCSIT）；King Faisal University（国王费萨尔大学）；Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia（费城托马斯杰斐逊大学）
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Despite the fact that image captioning models have been able to generate impressive descriptions for a given image, challenges remain: (1) the controllability and diversity of existing models are still far from satisfactory; (2) models sometimes may produce extremely poor-quality captions. In this paper, two novel methods are introduced to solve the problems respectively. Specifically, for the former problem, we introduce a control signal which can control the macroscopic sentence attributes, such as sentence quality, sentence length, sentence tense and number of nouns etc. With such a control…
Most current image captioning systems focus on describing general image content, and lack background knowledge to deeply understand the image, such as exact named entities or concrete events. In this work, we focus on the entity-aware news image captioning task which aims to generate informative captions by leveraging the associated news articles to provide background knowledge about the target image. However, due to the length of news articles, previous works only employ news articles at the coarse article or sentence level, which are not fine-grained enough to refine relevant events and choo…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
It is well believed that video captioning is a fundamental but challenging task in both computer vision and artificial intelligence fields. The prevalent approach is to map an input video to a variable-length output sentence in a sequence to sequence manner via Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Nevertheless, the training of RNN still suffers to some degree from vanishing/exploding gradient problem, making the optimization difficult. Moreover, the inherently recurrent dependency in RNN prevents parallelization within a sequence during training and therefore limits the computations. In this paper,…
ITIScore: An Image-to-Text-to-Image Rating Framework for the Image Captioning Ability of MLLMs
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Electronic and Science Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）；Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), University of Nantes（法国大学研究院（IUF），南特大学）
Automatic generation of caption to describe the content of an image has been gaining a lot of research interests recently, where most of the existing works treat the image caption as pure sequential data. Natural language, however possess a temporal hierarchy structure, with complex dependencies between each subsequence. In this paper, we propose a phrase-based hierarchical Long Short-Term Memory (phi-LSTM) model to generate image description. In contrast to the conventional solutions that generate caption in a pure sequential manner, our proposed model decodes image caption from phrase to sen…
University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）
Recently, there has been a lot of interest in automatically generating descriptions for an image. Most existing language-model based approaches for this task learn to generate an image description word by word in its original word order. However, for humans, it is more natural to locate the objects and their relationships first, and then elaborate on each object, describing notable attributes. We present a coarse-to-fine method that decomposes the original image description into a skeleton sentence and its attributes, and generates the skeleton sentence and attribute phrases separately. By thi…
Toward Robust Hyper-Detailed Image Captioning: A Multiagent Approach and Dual Evaluation Metrics for Factuality and Coverage
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University（电气与计算机工程系，首尔国立大学）；Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（人工智能交叉学科项目，首尔国立大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究）
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术学院）
A big part of achieving Artificial General Intelligence(AGI) is to build a machine that can see and listen like humans. Much work has focused on designing models for image classification, video classification, object detection, pose estimation, speech recognition, etc., and has achieved significant progress in recent years thanks to deep learning. However, understanding the world is not enough. An AI agent also needs to know how to talk, especially how to communicate with a human. While perception (vision, for example) is more common across animal species, the use of complicated language is un…
Scene Graph-guided SegCaptioning Transformer with Fine-grained Alignment for Controllable Video Segmentation and Captioning
College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University（湖南大学计算机科学与电子工程学院）；School of Robotics and the National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University（机器人学院和机器人视觉感知与控制技术国家工程研究中心，湖南大学）；School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University（计算机与人工智能学院，西南交通大学）；CRRC Zhuzhou Institute Company Ltd.（中车株洲院有限公司）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
The image captioning task is typically realized by an auto-regressive method that decodes the text tokens one by one. We present a diffusion-based captioning model, dubbed the name DDCap, to allow more decoding flexibility. Unlike image generation, where the output is continuous and redundant with a fixed length, texts in image captions are categorical and short with varied lengths. Therefore, naively applying the discrete diffusion model to text decoding does not work well, as shown in our experiments. To address the performance gap, we propose several key techniques including best-first infe…
