A large number of annotated video-caption pairs are required for training video captioning models, resulting in high annotation costs. Active learning can be instrumental in reducing these annotation requirements. However, active learning for video captioning is challenging because multiple semantically similar captions are valid for a video, resulting in high entropy outputs even for less-informative samples. Moreover, video captioning algorithms are multimodal in nature with a visual encoder and language decoder. Further, the sequential and combinatorial nature of the output makes the problem even more challenging. In this paper, we introduce MAViC which leverages our proposed Multimodal Semantics Aware Sequential Entropy (M-SASE) based acquisition function to address the challenges of active learning approaches for video captioning. Our approach integrates semantic similarity and uncertainty of both visual and language dimensions in the acquisition function. Our detailed experiments empirically demonstrate the efficacy of M-SASE for active learning for video captioning and improve on the baselines by a large margin.
Mila；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Learning specific hands-on skills such as cooking, car maintenance, and home repairs increasingly happens via instructional videos. The user experience with such videos is known to be improved by meta-information such as time-stamped annotations for the main steps involved. Generating such annotations automatically is challenging, and we describe here two relevant contributions. First, we construct and release a new dense video captioning dataset, Video Timeline Tags (ViTT), featuring a variety of instructional videos together with time-stamped annotations. Second, we explore several multimoda…
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 …
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）
LIUM, University of Le Mans（勒芒大学LIUM）；Galatasaray University（加拉塔萨雷大学）；CVC, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学CVC）
This paper presents the systems developed by LIUM and CVC for the WMT16 Multimodal Machine Translation challenge. We explored various comparative methods, namely phrase-based systems and attentional recurrent neural networks models trained using monomodal or multimodal data. We also performed a human evaluation in order to estimate the usefulness of multimodal data for human machine translation and image description generation. Our systems obtained the best results for both tasks according to the automatic evaluation metrics BLEU and METEOR.
Recent video and language pretraining frameworks lack the ability to generate sentences. We present Multimodal Video Generative Pretraining (MV-GPT), a new pretraining framework for learning from unlabelled videos which can be effectively used for generative tasks such as multimodal video captioning. Unlike recent video-language pretraining frameworks, our framework trains both a multimodal video encoder and a sentence decoder jointly. To overcome the lack of captions in unlabelled videos, we leverage the future utterance as an additional text source and propose a bidirectional generation obje…
We hypothesize that end-to-end neural image captioning systems work seemingly well because they exploit and learn `distributional similarity' in a multimodal feature space by mapping a test image to similar training images in this space and generating a caption from the same space. To validate our hypothesis, we focus on the `image' side of image captioning, and vary the input image representation but keep the RNN text generation component of a CNN-RNN model constant. Our analysis indicates that image captioning models (i) are capable of separating structure from noisy input representations; (…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Inspired by the fact that different modalities in videos carry complementary information, we propose a Multimodal Semantic Attention Network(MSAN), which is a new encoder-decoder framework incorporating multimodal semantic attributes for video captioning. In the encoding phase, we detect and generate multimodal semantic attributes by formulating it as a multi-label classification problem. Moreover, we add auxiliary classification loss to our model that can obtain more effective visual features and high-level multimodal semantic attribute distributions for sufficient video encoding. In the deco…
FLEUR: An Explainable Reference-Free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning Using a Large Multimodal Model
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（首尔大学人工智能跨学科项目）；Department of Mathematical Sciences, Seoul National University（首尔大学数学科学系）
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
The topic diversity of open-domain videos leads to various vocabularies and linguistic expressions in describing video contents, and therefore, makes the video captioning task even more challenging. In this paper, we propose an unified caption framework, M&M TGM, which mines multimodal topics in unsupervised fashion from data and guides the caption decoder with these topics. Compared to pre-defined topics, the mined multimodal topics are more semantically and visually coherent and can reflect the topic distribution of videos better. We formulate the topic-aware caption generation as a multi-ta…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Image captioning aims to automatically generate a natural language description of a given image, and most state-of-the-art models have adopted an encoder-decoder framework. The framework consists of a convolution neural network (CNN)-based image encoder that extracts region-based visual features from the input image, and an recurrent neural network (RNN)-based caption decoder that generates the output caption words based on the visual features with the attention mechanism. Despite the success of existing studies, current methods only model the co-attention that characterizes the inter-modal in…
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）
College of Information Science & Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学信息科学与电子工程学院）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Department of Computer Science, Binghamton University（宾汉姆顿大学计算机科学系）
In this paper, we focus on the problem of applying the transformer structure to video captioning effectively. The vanilla transformer is proposed for uni-modal language generation task such as machine translation. However, video captioning is a multimodal learning problem, and the video features have much redundancy between different time steps. Based on these concerns, we propose a novel method called sparse boundary-aware transformer (SBAT) to reduce the redundancy in video representation. SBAT employs boundary-aware pooling operation for scores from multihead attention and selects diverse f…
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…
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）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Toutiao AI Lab（今日头条人工智能实验室）；UESTC（电子科技大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
In this work we formulate the problem of image captioning as a multimodal translation task. Analogous to machine translation, we present a sequence-to-sequence recurrent neural networks (RNN) model for image caption generation. Different from most existing work where the whole image is represented by convolutional neural network (CNN) feature, we propose to represent the input image as a sequence of detected objects which feeds as the source sequence of the RNN model. In this way, the sequential representation of an image can be naturally translated to a sequence of words, as the target sequen…
BTCChat: Advancing Remote Sensing Bi-temporal Change Captioning with Multimodal Large Language Model
State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology（网络与交换技术国家重点实验室）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Aerospace Information Research Institute（航天信息研究所）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；School of Geographical Sciences（地理科学学院）；Hunan Normal University（湖南师范大学）
Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing（智能感知与计算研究中心）；National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition（模式识别国家重点实验室）；Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Video captioning which automatically translates video clips into natural language sentences is a very important task in computer vision. By virtue of recent deep learning technologies, e.g., convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs), video captioning has made great progress. However, learning an effective mapping from visual sequence space to language space is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a Multimodal Memory Model (M3) to describe videos, which builds a visual and textual shared memory to model the long-term visual-textual dependency an…
Automatically captioning images with natural language sentences is an important research topic. State of the art models are able to produce human-like sentences. These models typically describe the depicted scene as a whole and do not target specific objects of interest or emotional relationships between these objects in the image. However, marketing companies require to describe these important attributes of a given scene. In our case, objects of interest are consumer goods, which are usually identifiable by a product logo and are associated with certain brands. From a marketing point of view…
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…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Utah（犹他大学）
Combining the visual modality with pretrained language models has been surprisingly effective for simple descriptive tasks such as image captioning. More general text generation however remains elusive. We take a step back and ask: How do these models work for more complex generative tasks, i.e. conditioning on both text and images? Are multimodal models simply visually adapted language models, or do they combine they reason jointly over modalities? We investigate these questions in the context of self-rationalization (jointly generating task labels/answers and free-text explanations) of three…
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）
Automatically generating a natural language sentence to describe the content of an input video is a very challenging problem. It is an essential multimodal task in which auditory and visual contents are equally important. Although audio information has been exploited to improve video captioning in previous works, it is usually regarded as an additional feature fed into a black box fusion machine. How are the words in the generated sentences associated with the auditory and visual modalities? The problem is still not investigated. In this paper, we make the first attempt to design an interpreta…
Recently, video captioning has been attracting an increasing amount of interest, due to its potential for improving accessibility and information retrieval. While existing methods rely on different kinds of visual features and model structures, they do not fully exploit relevant semantic information. We present an extensible approach to jointly leverage several sorts of visual features and semantic attributes. Our novel architecture builds on LSTMs for sentence generation, with several attention layers and two multimodal layers. The attention mechanism learns to automatically select the most s…
Detecting and Understanding Hateful Contents in Memes Through Captioning and Visual Question-Answering
The University of Sydney, School of Computer Science（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；University of Technology Sydney, School of Computer Science（新南威尔士大学技术学院）；University of Technology Sydney, TD School（新南威尔士大学TD学院）；Australian Catholic University, Peter Faber Business School（澳大利亚天主教大学彼得·法伯商学院）
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…
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…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
An image caption should fluently present the essential information in a given image, including informative, fine-grained entity mentions and the manner in which these entities interact. However, current captioning models are usually trained to generate captions that only contain common object names, thus falling short on an important "informativeness" dimension. We present a mechanism for integrating image information together with fine-grained labels (assumed to be generated by some upstream models) into a caption that describes the image in a fluent and informative manner. We introduce a mul…
NAVER AI Lab（NAVER人工智能实验室）；CLOVA；SNU AIIS（首尔大学人工智能研究所）；KAIST AI（韩国科学技术院人工智能研究生院）
Text-to-image generation and image captioning are recently emerged as a new experimental paradigm to assess machine intelligence. They predict continuous quantity accompanied by their sampling techniques in the generation, making evaluation complicated and intractable to get marginal distributions. Based on a recent trend that multimodal generative evaluations exploit a vison-and-language pre-trained model, we propose the negative Gaussian cross-mutual information using the CLIP features as a unified metric, coined by Mutual Information Divergence (MID). To validate, we extensively compare it …
RSICCLLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning
State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（人工智能安全国家重点实验室，计算技术研究所，中国科学院，北京，中国）；Great Bay University, Dongguan, China（东莞Great Bay大学，中国）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China（哈尔滨工业大学深圳学院，中国）；Dongguan Key Laboratory for Intelligence and Information Technology, Dongguan, China（东莞智能与信息科技重点实验室，中国）
Modern image captioning models are usually trained with text similarity objectives. However, since reference captions in public datasets often describe the most salient common objects, models trained with text similarity objectives tend to ignore specific and detailed aspects of an image that distinguish it from others. Toward more descriptive and distinctive caption generation, we propose using CLIP, a multimodal encoder trained on huge image-text pairs from web, to calculate multimodal similarity and use it as a reward function. We also propose a simple finetuning strategy of the CLIP text e…
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…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Image captioning as a multimodal task has drawn much interest in recent years. However, evaluation for this task remains a challenging problem. Existing evaluation metrics focus on surface similarity between a candidate caption and a set of reference captions, and do not check the actual relation between a caption and the underlying visual content. We introduce a new diagnostic evaluation framework for the task of image captioning, with the goal of directly assessing models for grammaticality, truthfulness and diversity (GTD) of generated captions. We demonstrate the potential of our evaluatio…
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…
Modelling Visual Semantics via Image Captioning to extract Enhanced Multi-Level Cross-Modal Semantic Incongruity Representation with Attention for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba AI Labs（阿里巴巴人工智能实验室）
Image captioning is a multimodal task involving computer vision and natural language processing, where the goal is to learn a mapping from the image to its natural language description. In general, the mapping function is learned from a training set of image-caption pairs. However, for some language, large scale image-caption paired corpus might not be available. We present an approach to this unpaired image captioning problem by language pivoting. Our method can effectively capture the characteristics of an image captioner from the pivot language (Chinese) and align it to the target language …
Neural Image Captioning (NIC) or neural caption generation has attracted a lot of attention over the last few years. Describing an image with a natural language has been an emerging challenge in both fields of computer vision and language processing. Therefore a lot of research has focused on driving this task forward with new creative ideas. So far, the goal has been to maximize scores on automated metric and to do so, one has to come up with a plurality of new modules and techniques. Once these add up, the models become complex and resource-hungry. In this paper, we take a small step backwar…
AVC-DPO: Aligned Video Captioning via Direct Preference Optimization
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学人工智能学院）；College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University（南开大学人工智能学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）
