The area of automatic image caption evaluation is still undergoing intensive research to address the needs of generating captions which can meet adequacy and fluency requirements. Based on our past attempts at developing highly sophisticated learning-based metrics, we have discovered that a simple cosine similarity measure using the Mean of Word Embeddings(MOWE) of captions can actually achieve a surprisingly high performance on unsupervised caption evaluation. This inspires our proposed work on an effective metric WEmbSim, which beats complex measures such as SPICE, CIDEr and WMD at system-level correlation with human judgments. Moreover, it also achieves the best accuracy at matching human consensus scores for caption pairs, against commonly used unsupervised methods. Therefore, we believe that WEmbSim sets a new baseline for any complex metric to be justified.
Nagoya University（名古屋大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
Image captioning models require the high-level generalization ability to describe the contents of various images in words. Most existing approaches treat the image-caption pairs equally in their training without considering the differences in their learning difficulties. Several image captioning approaches introduce curriculum learning methods that present training data with increasing levels of difficulty. However, their difficulty measurements are either based on domain-specific features or prior model training. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient difficulty measurement for imag…
Lunit Inc.（Lunit 公司）；Seoul National University（首尔大学）
We address personalization issues of image captioning, which have not been discussed yet in previous research. For a query image, we aim to generate a descriptive sentence, accounting for prior knowledge such as the user's active vocabularies in previous documents. As applications of personalized image captioning, we tackle two post automation tasks: hashtag prediction and post generation, on our newly collected Instagram dataset, consisting of 1.1M posts from 6.3K users. We propose a novel captioning model named Context Sequence Memory Network (CSMN). Its unique updates over previous memory n…
We study societal bias amplification in image captioning. Image captioning models have been shown to perpetuate gender and racial biases, however, metrics to measure, quantify, and evaluate the societal bias in captions are not yet standardized. We provide a comprehensive study on the strengths and limitations of each metric, and propose LIC, a metric to study captioning bias amplification. We argue that, for image captioning, it is not enough to focus on the correct prediction of the protected attribute, and the whole context should be taken into account. We conduct extensive evaluation on tr…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）
Tremendous progress has been made in recent years in developing better image captioning models, yet most of them rely on a separate object detector to extract regional features. Recent vision-language studies are shifting towards the detector-free trend by leveraging grid representations for more flexible model training and faster inference speed. However, such development is primarily focused on image understanding tasks, and remains less investigated for the caption generation task. In this paper, we are concerned with a better-performing detector-free image captioning model, and propose a p…
Dense video captioning aims to localize and describe important events in untrimmed videos. Existing methods mainly tackle this task by exploiting only visual features, while completely neglecting the audio track. Only a few prior works have utilized both modalities, yet they show poor results or demonstrate the importance on a dataset with a specific domain. In this paper, we introduce Bi-modal Transformer which generalizes the Transformer architecture for a bi-modal input. We show the effectiveness of the proposed model with audio and visual modalities on the dense video captioning task, yet …
Explaining an image with missing or non-existent objects is known as object bias (hallucination) in image captioning. This behaviour is quite common in the state-of-the-art captioning models which is not desirable by humans. To decrease the object hallucination in captioning, we propose three simple yet efficient training augmentation method for sentences which requires no new training data or increase in the model size. By extensive analysis, we show that the proposed methods can significantly diminish our models' object bias on hallucination metrics. Moreover, we experimentally demonstrate t…
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；ByteDance Inc.（字节跳动公司）；University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）
Recent studies on dense captioning and visual grounding in 3D have achieved impressive results. Despite developments in both areas, the limited amount of available 3D vision-language data causes overfitting issues for 3D visual grounding and 3D dense captioning methods. Also, how to discriminatively describe objects in complex 3D environments is not fully studied yet. To address these challenges, we present D3Net, an end-to-end neural speaker-listener architecture that can detect, describe and discriminate. Our D3Net unifies dense captioning and visual grounding in 3D in a self-critical manner…
Re$^3$Cap: Retrieval-Guided Refinement for Image Captioning Enhancement via Reinforcement Learning
Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba（阿里巴巴淘宝和天猫集团）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）；NVIDIA AI Technology Centre（英伟达人工智能技术中心）
Connecting Vision and Language plays an essential role in Generative Intelligence. For this reason, large research efforts have been devoted to image captioning, i.e. describing images with syntactically and semantically meaningful sentences. Starting from 2015 the task has generally been addressed with pipelines composed of a visual encoder and a language model for text generation. During these years, both components have evolved considerably through the exploitation of object regions, attributes, the introduction of multi-modal connections, fully-attentive approaches, and BERT-like early-fus…
Recently, much advance has been made in image captioning, and an encoder-decoder framework has been adopted by all the state-of-the-art models. Under this framework, an input image is encoded by a convolutional neural network (CNN) and then translated into natural language with a recurrent neural network (RNN). The existing models counting on this framework merely employ one kind of CNNs, e.g., ResNet or Inception-X, which describe image contents from only one specific view point. Thus, the semantic meaning of an input image cannot be comprehensively understood, which restricts the performance…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Meta AI；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）
Performing 3D dense captioning and visual grounding requires a common and shared understanding of the underlying multimodal relationships. However, despite some previous attempts on connecting these two related tasks with highly task-specific neural modules, it remains understudied how to explicitly depict their shared nature to learn them simultaneously. In this work, we propose UniT3D, a simple yet effective fully unified transformer-based architecture for jointly solving 3D visual grounding and dense captioning. UniT3D enables learning a strong multimodal representation across the two tasks…
Mitsubishi electric research laboratories（三菱电机研究实验室）
Video captioning is an essential technology to understand scenes and describe events in natural language. To apply it to real-time monitoring, a system needs not only to describe events accurately but also to produce the captions as soon as possible. Low-latency captioning is needed to realize such functionality, but this research area for online video captioning has not been pursued yet. This paper proposes a novel approach to optimize each caption's output timing based on a trade-off between latency and caption quality. An audio-visual Trans-former is trained to generate ground-truth caption…
Peking University（北京大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Recently, attention-based encoder-decoder models have been used extensively in image captioning. Yet there is still great difficulty for the current methods to achieve deep image understanding. In this work, we argue that such understanding requires visual attention to correlated image regions and semantic attention to coherent attributes of interest. Based on the Transformer, to perform effective attention, we explore image captioning from a cross-modal perspective and propose the Global-and-Local Information Exploring-and-Distilling approach that explores and distills the source information …
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…
University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh（孟加拉国自由艺术大学）；North South University（北南大学）
Automatic image caption generation aims to produce an accurate description of an image in natural language automatically. However, Bangla, the fifth most widely spoken language in the world, is lagging considerably in the research and development of such domain. Besides, while there are many established data sets to related to image annotation in English, no such resource exists for Bangla yet. Hence, this paper outlines the development of "Chittron", an automatic image captioning system in Bangla. Moreover, to address the data set availability issue, a collection of 16,000 Bangladeshi context…
The attention mechanisms in deep neural networks are inspired by human's attention that sequentially focuses on the most relevant parts of the information over time to generate prediction output. The attention parameters in those models are implicitly trained in an end-to-end manner, yet there have been few trials to explicitly incorporate human gaze tracking to supervise the attention models. In this paper, we investigate whether attention models can benefit from explicit human gaze labels, especially for the task of video captioning. We collect a new dataset called VAS, consisting of movie c…
PIGEONS: Incremental Long-Video Captioning with Persistent Identity Gallery and Evolving Overarching Narrative Summary
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)（中国科学院自动化研究所）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
School of Artificial Intelligence Beijing Univerisity of Posts\ Telecommunications Beijing, China Email；Department of Electrical；School of Artificial Intelligence Beijing Univerisity of Posts
Traditional video captioning requests a holistic description of the video, yet the detailed descriptions of the specific objects may not be available. Without associating the moving trajectories, these image-based data-driven methods cannot understand the activities from the spatio-temporal transitions in the inter-object visual features. Besides, adopting ambiguous clip-sentence pairs in training, it goes against learning the multi-modal functional mappings owing to the one-to-many nature. In this paper, we propose a novel task to understand the videos in object-level, named object-oriented v…
Dept. of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学计算机科学系）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Diverse image captioning models aim to learn one-to-many mappings that are innate to cross-domain datasets, such as of images and texts. Current methods for this task are based on generative latent variable models, e.g. VAEs with structured latent spaces. Yet, the amount of multimodality captured by prior work is limited to that of the paired training data -- the true diversity of the underlying generative process is not fully captured. To address this limitation, we leverage the contextual descriptions in the dataset that explain similar contexts in different visual scenes. To this end, we in…
It is highly desirable yet challenging to generate image captions that can describe novel objects which are unseen in caption-labeled training data, a capability that is evaluated in the novel object captioning challenge (nocaps). In this challenge, no additional image-caption training data, other thanCOCO Captions, is allowed for model training. Thus, conventional Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) methods cannot be applied. This paper presents VIsual VOcabulary pretraining (VIVO) that performs pre-training in the absence of caption annotations. By breaking the dependency of paired image-capt…
CCCaption: Dual-Reward Reinforcement Learning for Complete and Correct Image Captioning
Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算机网络信息中心）；Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学杭州高等研究院）；LLM Team, Shopee Pte. Ltd.（Shopee私人有限公司大语言模型团队）
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）
Dense video captioning aims to generate multiple associated captions with their temporal locations from the video. Previous methods follow a sophisticated "localize-then-describe" scheme, which heavily relies on numerous hand-crafted components. In this paper, we proposed a simple yet effective framework for end-to-end dense video captioning with parallel decoding (PDVC), by formulating the dense caption generation as a set prediction task. In practice, through stacking a newly proposed event counter on the top of a transformer decoder, the PDVC precisely segments the video into a number of ev…
Microsoft（微软）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
Automatic image captioning has recently approached human-level performance due to the latest advances in computer vision and natural language understanding. However, most of the current models can only generate plain factual descriptions about the content of a given image. However, for human beings, image caption writing is quite flexible and diverse, where additional language dimensions, such as emotion, humor and language styles, are often incorporated to produce diverse, emotional, or appealing captions. In particular, we are interested in generating sentiment-conveying image descriptions, …
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Youtu Lab, Tencent（腾讯优图实验室）
We study the problem of weakly supervised grounded image captioning. That is, given an image, the goal is to automatically generate a sentence describing the context of the image with each noun word grounded to the corresponding region in the image. This task is challenging due to the lack of explicit fine-grained region word alignments as supervision. Previous weakly supervised methods mainly explore various kinds of regularization schemes to improve attention accuracy. However, their performances are still far from the fully supervised ones. One main issue that has been ignored is that the a…
Incorporating granularity bias as the margin into contrastive loss for video captioning
The School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学计算机科学与工程学院）；The School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学航空航天学院）
针对视频描述中短语长尾分布导致的粒度偏差问题，提出基于统计的偏差提取器量化偏差影响，并将粒度偏差作为间隔融入双向三元组对比损失（GMC Loss），为头部和尾部句子建立不同训练目标，在 MSRVTT 和 MSVD 上达到 SOTA 性能。
Player-Centric Multimodal Prompt Generation for Large Language Model Based Identity-Aware Basketball Video Captioning
Beijing University of Technology（北京理工大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Human ratings are currently the most accurate way to assess the quality of an image captioning model, yet most often the only used outcome of an expensive human rating evaluation is a few overall statistics over the evaluation dataset. In this paper, we show that the signal from instance-level human caption ratings can be leveraged to improve captioning models, even when the amount of caption ratings is several orders of magnitude less than the caption training data. We employ a policy gradient method to maximize the human ratings as rewards in an off-policy reinforcement learning setting, whe…
Beyond Binary Preferences: Graded Preference Optimization for Limb-Motion Captioning
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Department of Applied Informatics, Graduate School of Science
We propose a simple yet effective image captioning framework that can determine the quality of an image and notify the user of the reasons for any flaws in the image. Our framework first determines the quality of images and then generates captions using only those images that are determined to be of high quality. The user is notified by the flaws feature to retake if image quality is low, and this cycle is repeated until the input image is deemed to be of high quality. As a component of the framework, we trained and evaluated a low-quality image detection model that simultaneously learns diffi…
While advanced image captioning systems are increasingly describing images coherently and exactly, recent progress in continual learning allows deep learning models to avoid catastrophic forgetting. However, the domain where image captioning working with continual learning has not yet been explored. We define the task in which we consolidate continual learning and image captioning as continual image captioning. In this work, we propose ContCap, a framework generating captions over a series of new tasks coming, seamlessly integrating continual learning into image captioning besides addressing c…
