Pre-training visual and textual representations from large-scale image-text pairs is becoming a standard approach for many downstream vision-language tasks. The transformer-based models learn inter and intra-modal attention through a list of self-supervised learning tasks. This paper proposes LAViTeR, a novel architecture for visual and textual representation learning. The main module, Visual Textual Alignment (VTA) will be assisted by two auxiliary tasks, GAN-based image synthesis and Image Captioning. We also propose a new evaluation metric measuring the similarity between the learnt visual and textual embedding. The experimental results on two public datasets, CUB and MS-COCO, demonstrate superior visual and textual representation alignment in the joint feature embedding space
Charles University（查理大学）；Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；RIKEN AIP（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
We present our work in progress exploring the possibilities of a shared embedding space between textual and visual modality. Leveraging the textual nature of object detection labels and the hypothetical expressiveness of extracted visual object representations, we propose an approach opposite to the current trend, grounding of the representations in the word embedding space of the captioning system instead of grounding words or sentences in their associated images. Based on the previous work, we apply additional grounding losses to the image captioning training objective aiming to force visual…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Medical image captioning automatically generates a medical description to describe the content of a given medical image. A traditional medical image captioning model creates a medical description only based on a single medical image input. Hence, an abstract medical description or concept is hard to be generated based on the traditional approach. Such a method limits the effectiveness of medical image captioning. Multi-modal medical image captioning is one of the approaches utilized to address this problem. In multi-modal medical image captioning, textual input, e.g., expert-defined keywords, …
Visual Semantic Relatedness Dataset for Image Captioning
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；TALP Research Center（TALP研究中心）；Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC（西班牙国家研究委员会-加泰罗尼亚理工大学工业机器人与信息技术研究所）
EAMA : Entity-Aware Multimodal Alignment Based Approach for News Image Captioning
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学电子工程与计算机科学学院）
Paragraph-style image captions describe diverse aspects of an image as opposed to the more common single-sentence captions that only provide an abstract description of the image. These paragraph captions can hence contain substantial information of the image for tasks such as visual question answering. Moreover, this textual information is complementary with visual information present in the image because it can discuss both more abstract concepts and more explicit, intermediate symbolic information about objects, events, and scenes that can directly be matched with the textual question and co…
Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Dense video captioning is a task of localizing interesting events from an untrimmed video and producing textual description (captions) for each localized event. Most of the previous works in dense video captioning are solely based on visual information and completely ignore the audio track. However, audio, and speech, in particular, are vital cues for a human observer in understanding an environment. In this paper, we present a new dense video captioning approach that is able to utilize any number of modalities for event description. Specifically, we show how audio and speech modalities may im…
DiffVC: A Non-autoregressive Framework Based on Diffusion Model for Video Captioning
School of Software, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学软件学院）；School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机学院）；Beijing University Of Technology（北京工业大学）
Ingenuity Labs Research Institute, Queen’s University（女王大学Ingenuity实验室研究所）；Queen’s University（女王大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
Image captioning is a multimodal problem that has drawn extensive attention in both the natural language processing and computer vision community. In this paper, we present a novel image captioning architecture to better explore semantics available in captions and leverage that to enhance both image representation and caption generation. Our models first construct caption-guided visual relationship graphs that introduce beneficial inductive bias using weakly supervised multi-instance learning. The representation is then enhanced with neighbouring and contextual nodes with their textual and vis…
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Peng Cheng National Laboratory（鹏城国家实验室）；Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing（广东省智能信息处理重点实验室）；Shenzhen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与社会机器人研究院）；Guangdong-Hong Kong Joint Laboratory for Big Data Imaging and Communication（粤港大数据图像与通信联合实验室）；The University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）
Image aesthetic quality assessment (AQA) aims to assign numerical aesthetic ratings to images whilst image aesthetic captioning (IAC) aims to generate textual descriptions of the aesthetic aspects of images. In this paper, we study image AQA and IAC together and present a new IAC method termed Aesthetically Relevant Image Captioning (ARIC). Based on the observation that most textual comments of an image are about objects and their interactions rather than aspects of aesthetics, we first introduce the concept of Aesthetic Relevance Score (ARS) of a sentence and have developed a model to automat…
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…
Powerful generative adversarial networks (GAN) have been developed to automatically synthesize realistic images from text. However, most existing tasks are limited to generating simple images such as flowers from captions. In this work, we extend this problem to the less addressed domain of face generation from fine-grained textual descriptions of face, e.g., "A person has curly hair, oval face, and mustache". We are motivated by the potential of automated face generation to impact and assist critical tasks such as criminal face reconstruction. Since current datasets for the task are either ve…
INESC-ID；Instituto Superior Técnico（高等技术学院）；University of Lisbon（里斯本大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
Inspired by retrieval-augmented language generation and pretrained Vision and Language (V&L) encoders, we present a new approach to image captioning that generates sentences given the input image and a set of captions retrieved from a datastore, as opposed to the image alone. The encoder in our model jointly processes the image and retrieved captions using a pretrained V&L BERT, while the decoder attends to the multimodal encoder representations, benefiting from the extra textual evidence from the retrieved captions. Experimental results on the COCO dataset show that image captioning can be ef…
Visual Question Answering (VQA) has benefited from increasingly sophisticated models, but has not enjoyed the same level of engagement in terms of data creation. In this paper, we propose a method that automatically derives VQA examples at volume, by leveraging the abundance of existing image-caption annotations combined with neural models for textual question generation. We show that the resulting data is of high-quality. VQA models trained on our data improve state-of-the-art zero-shot accuracy by double digits and achieve a level of robustness that lacks in the same model trained on human-a…
In recent years, vision and language pre-training (VLP) models have advanced the state-of-the-art results in a variety of cross-modal downstream tasks. Aligning cross-modal semantics is claimed to be one of the essential capabilities of VLP models. However, it still remains unclear about the inner working mechanism of alignment in VLP models. In this paper, we propose a new probing method that is based on image captioning to first empirically study the cross-modal semantics alignment of VLP models. Our probing method is built upon the fact that given an image-caption pair, the VLP models will …
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）；Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究所）
Automatically generating natural language descriptions from an image is a challenging problem in artificial intelligence that requires a good understanding of the visual and textual signals and the correlations between them. The state-of-the-art methods in image captioning struggles to approach human level performance, especially when data is limited. In this paper, we propose to improve the performance of the state-of-the-art image captioning models by incorporating two sources of prior knowledge: (i) a conditional latent topic attention, that uses a set of latent variables (topics) as an anc…
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…
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Describing images in natural language is a fundamental step towards the automatic modeling of connections between the visual and textual modalities. In this paper we present CaMEL, a novel Transformer-based architecture for image captioning. Our proposed approach leverages the interaction of two interconnected language models that learn from each other during the training phase. The interplay between the two language models follows a mean teacher learning paradigm with knowledge distillation. Experimentally, we assess the effectiveness of the proposed solution on the COCO dataset and in conjun…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
The traditional image captioning task uses generic reference captions to provide textual information about images. Different user populations, however, will care about different visual aspects of images. In this paper, we propose a new task, Captioning with a Purpose (CapWAP). Our goal is to develop systems that can be tailored to be useful for the information needs of an intended population, rather than merely provide generic information about an image. In this task, we use question-answer (QA) pairs---a natural expression of information need---from users, instead of reference captions, for b…
V-SENSE School of Computer Science Statistics Trinity College Dublin（V-SENSE计算机科学与统计学院都柏林大学三一学院）
Aesthetic image captioning (AIC) refers to the multi-modal task of generating critical textual feedbacks for photographs. While in natural image captioning (NIC), deep models are trained in an end-to-end manner using large curated datasets such as MS-COCO, no such large-scale, clean dataset exists for AIC. Towards this goal, we propose an automatic cleaning strategy to create a benchmarking AIC dataset, by exploiting the images and noisy comments easily available from photography websites. We propose a probabilistic caption-filtering method for cleaning the noisy web-data, and compile a large-…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Inria Paris（法国国家信息与自动化研究所巴黎分部）；Département d’informatique de l’ENS（巴黎高等师范学院计算机系）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；DeepMind（深度思维）；Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics at the Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格技术大学信息学、机器人学与控制论研究所）
In this work, we introduce Vid2Seq, a multi-modal single-stage dense event captioning model pretrained on narrated videos which are readily-available at scale. The Vid2Seq architecture augments a language model with special time tokens, allowing it to seamlessly predict event boundaries and textual descriptions in the same output sequence. Such a unified model requires large-scale training data, which is not available in current annotated datasets. We show that it is possible to leverage unlabeled narrated videos for dense video captioning, by reformulating sentence boundaries of transcribed s…
Image captioning models generally lack the capability to take into account user interest, and usually default to global descriptions that try to balance readability, informativeness, and information overload. On the other hand, VQA models generally lack the ability to provide long descriptive answers, while expecting the textual question to be quite precise. We present a method to control the concepts that an image caption should focus on, using an additional input called the guiding text that refers to either groundable or ungroundable concepts in the image. Our model consists of a Transforme…
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York（纽约市立大学研究生中心）；The City College, The City University of New York（纽约市立大学城市学院）
In this paper, a self-guiding multimodal LSTM (sg-LSTM) image captioning model is proposed to handle uncontrolled imbalanced real-world image-sentence dataset. We collect FlickrNYC dataset from Flickr as our testbed with 306,165 images and the original text descriptions uploaded by the users are utilized as the ground truth for training. Descriptions in FlickrNYC dataset vary dramatically ranging from short term-descriptions to long paragraph-descriptions and can describe any visual aspects, or even refer to objects that are not depicted. To deal with the imbalanced and noisy situation and to …
Methodologies for training visual question answering (VQA) models assume the availability of datasets with human-annotated \textit{Image-Question-Answer} (I-Q-A) triplets. This has led to heavy reliance on datasets and a lack of generalization to new types of questions and scenes. Linguistic priors along with biases and errors due to annotator subjectivity have been shown to percolate into VQA models trained on such samples. We study whether models can be trained without any human-annotated Q-A pairs, but only with images and their associated textual descriptions or captions. We present a meth…
Along with the prosperity of recurrent neural network in modelling sequential data and the power of attention mechanism in automatically identify salient information, image captioning, a.k.a., image description, has been remarkably advanced in recent years. Nonetheless, most existing paradigms may suffer from the deficiency of invariance to images with different scaling, rotation, etc.; and effective integration of standalone attention to form a holistic end-to-end system. In this paper, we propose a novel image captioning architecture, termed Recurrent Image Captioner (\textbf{RIC}), which al…
One of the ways blind people understand their surroundings is by clicking images and relying on descriptions generated by image captioning systems. Current work on captioning images for the visually impaired do not use the textual data present in the image when generating captions. This problem is critical as many visual scenes contain text. Moreover, up to 21% of the questions asked by blind people about the images they click pertain to the text present in them. In this work, we propose altering AoANet, a state-of-the-art image captioning model, to leverage the text detected in the image as a…
Automated audio captioning aims at generating textual descriptions for an audio clip. To evaluate the quality of generated audio captions, previous works directly adopt image captioning metrics like SPICE and CIDEr, without justifying their suitability in this new domain, which may mislead the development of advanced models. This problem is still unstudied due to the lack of human judgment datasets on caption quality. Therefore, we firstly construct two evaluation benchmarks, AudioCaps-Eval and Clotho-Eval. They are established with pairwise comparison instead of absolute rating to achieve bet…
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…
Idiap Research Institute（Idiap研究所）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院（EPFL））；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Generating a novel textual description of an image is an interesting problem that connects computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we present a simple model that is able to generate descriptive sentences given a sample image. This model has a strong focus on the syntax of the descriptions. We train a purely bilinear model that learns a metric between an image representation (generated from a previously trained Convolutional Neural Network) and phrases that are used to described them. The system is then able to infer phrases from a given image sample. Based on caption sy…
Image Difference Captioning (IDC) aims at generating sentences to describe differences between two similar-looking images. Conventional approaches learn an IDC model with a pre-trained and usually frozen visual feature extractor. Accordingly, two major issues may arise: (1) a large domain gap usually exists between the pre-training datasets used for training such a visual encoder and that of the downstream IDC task, and (2) the visual feature extractor, when separately encoding two images, often does not effectively encode the visual changes between two images. Due to the excellent zero-shot p…
Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；NVIDIA Research（英伟达研究院）；The Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Object detection is a fundamental task in computer vision, requiring large annotated datasets that are difficult to collect, as annotators need to label objects and their bounding boxes. Thus, it is a significant challenge to use cheaper forms of supervision effectively. Recent work has begun to explore image captions as a source for weak supervision, but to date, in the context of object detection, captions have only been used to infer the categories of the objects in the image. In this work, we argue that captions contain much richer information about the image, including attributes of objec…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Swedish Medical Group（瑞典医疗集团）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Understanding the relationship between figures and text is key to scientific document understanding. Medical figures in particular are quite complex, often consisting of several subfigures (75% of figures in our dataset), with detailed text describing their content. Previous work studying figures in scientific papers focused on classifying figure content rather than understanding how images relate to the text. To address challenges in figure retrieval and figure-to-text alignment, we introduce MedICaT, a dataset of medical images in context. MedICaT consists of 217K images from 131K open acces…
Significant progress has been made on visual captioning, largely relying on pre-trained features and later fixed object detectors that serve as rich inputs to auto-regressive models. A key limitation of such methods, however, is that the output of the model is conditioned only on the object detector's outputs. The assumption that such outputs can represent all necessary information is unrealistic, especially when the detector is transferred across datasets. In this work, we reason about the graphical model induced by this assumption, and propose to add an auxiliary input to represent missing i…
Center of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能中心）；Mantalus（曼塔鲁斯）；Center of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence（人工智能卓越中心）；Bahria University（巴里亚大学）
Textual content appearing in videos represents an interesting index for semantic retrieval of videos (from archives), generation of alerts (live streams) as well as high level applications like opinion mining and content summarization. One of the key components of such systems is the detection of textual content in video frames and the same makes the subject of our present study. This paper presents a robust technique for detection of textual content appearing in video frames. More specifically we target text in cursive script taking Urdu text as a case study. Detection of textual regions in v…
Image captioning is a fundamental task in vision-language understanding, where the model predicts a textual informative caption to a given input image. In this paper, we present a simple approach to address this task. We use CLIP encoding as a prefix to the caption, by employing a simple mapping network, and then fine-tunes a language model to generate the image captions. The recently proposed CLIP model contains rich semantic features which were trained with textual context, making it best for vision-language perception. Our key idea is that together with a pre-trained language model (GPT2), …
Computer vision tasks such as object detection and semantic/instance segmentation rely on the painstaking annotation of large training datasets. In this paper, we propose LocTex that takes advantage of the low-cost localized textual annotations (i.e., captions and synchronized mouse-over gestures) to reduce the annotation effort. We introduce a contrastive pre-training framework between images and captions and propose to supervise the cross-modal attention map with rendered mouse traces to provide coarse localization signals. Our learned visual features capture rich semantics (from free-form c…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
This paper strives to find amidst a set of sentences the one best describing the content of a given image or video. Different from existing works, which rely on a joint subspace for their image and video caption retrieval, we propose to do so in a visual space exclusively. Apart from this conceptual novelty, we contribute \emph{Word2VisualVec}, a deep neural network architecture that learns to predict a visual feature representation from textual input. Example captions are encoded into a textual embedding based on multi-scale sentence vectorization and further transferred into a deep visual fe…
Since acquiring pixel-wise annotations for training convolutional neural networks for semantic image segmentation is time-consuming, weakly supervised approaches that only require class tags have been proposed. In this work, we propose another form of supervision, namely image captions as they can be found on the Internet. These captions have two advantages. They do not require additional curation as it is the case for the clean class tags used by current weakly supervised approaches and they provide textual context for the classes present in an image. To leverage such textual context, we depl…
The de-facto approach to many vision tasks is to start from pretrained visual representations, typically learned via supervised training on ImageNet. Recent methods have explored unsupervised pretraining to scale to vast quantities of unlabeled images. In contrast, we aim to learn high-quality visual representations from fewer images. To this end, we revisit supervised pretraining, and seek data-efficient alternatives to classification-based pretraining. We propose VirTex -- a pretraining approach using semantically dense captions to learn visual representations. We train convolutional network…
