Augmenting pretrained language models (LMs) with a vision encoder (e.g., Flamingo) has obtained the state-of-the-art results in image-to-text generation. However, these models store all the knowledge within their parameters, thus often requiring enormous model parameters to model the abundant visual concepts and very rich textual descriptions. Additionally, they are inefficient in incorporating new data, requiring a computational-expensive fine-tuning process. In this work, we introduce a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model, Re-ViLM, built upon the Flamingo, that supports retrieving the relevant knowledge from the external database for zero and in-context few-shot image-to-text generations. By storing certain knowledge explicitly in the external database, our approach reduces the number of model parameters and can easily accommodate new data during evaluation by simply updating the database. We also construct an interleaved image and text data that facilitates in-context few-shot learning capabilities. We demonstrate that Re-ViLM significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks, especially for zero-shot and few-shot generation in out-of-domain settings with 4 times less parameters compared with baseline methods.
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Image captioning models aim at connecting Vision and Language by providing natural language descriptions of input images. In the past few years, the task has been tackled by learning parametric models and proposing visual feature extraction advancements or by modeling better multi-modal connections. In this paper, we investigate the development of an image captioning approach with a kNN memory, with which knowledge can be retrieved from an external corpus to aid the generation process. Our architecture combines a knowledge retriever based on visual similarities, a differentiable encoder, and a…
RACap: Relation-Aware Prompting for Lightweight Retrieval-Augmented Image Captioning
School of biological science and medical engineering, Southeast University, China（生物科学与医学工程学院，东南大学，中国）；Department of Neurosurgery, The second affiliated hospital of Xinjiang Medical University, China（神经外科部门，新疆医科大学第二附属医院，中国）
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…
CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) has shown remarkable zero-shot transfer capabilities in cross-modal correlation tasks such as visual classification and image retrieval. However, its performance in cross-modal generation tasks like zero-shot image captioning remains unsatisfied. In this work, we discuss that directly employing CLIP for zero-shot image captioning relies more on the textual modality in context and largely ignores the visual information, which we call \emph{contextual language prior}. To address this, we propose Cross-modal Language Models (CLMs) to facilitate unsup…
Automatically describing video, or video captioning, has been widely studied in the multimedia field. This paper proposes a new task of sensor-augmented egocentric-video captioning, a newly constructed dataset for it called MMAC Captions, and a method for the newly proposed task that effectively utilizes multi-modal data of video and motion sensors, or inertial measurement units (IMUs). While conventional video captioning tasks have difficulty in dealing with detailed descriptions of human activities due to the limited view of a fixed camera, egocentric vision has greater potential to be used …
TPCap: Unlocking Zero-Shot Image Captioning with Trigger-Augmented and Multi-Modal Purification Modules
Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学信息工程与自动化学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Computer Technologies Application（云南省计算机技术应用重点实验室）；Hongyun Honghe Group Honghe Cigarette Factory（红云红河集团红河卷烟厂）
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；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）
Video captioning aims to describe the content of videos using natural language. Although significant progress has been made, there is still much room to improve the performance for real-world applications, mainly due to the long-tail words challenge. In this paper, we propose a text with knowledge graph augmented transformer (TextKG) for video captioning. Notably, TextKG is a two-stream transformer, formed by the external stream and internal stream. The external stream is designed to absorb additional knowledge, which models the interactions between the additional knowledge, e.g., pre-built kn…
Adjudicated Captioning: Multi-Agent Alignment Scoring and Consensus-Distilled Beam Arbitration for Strict Zero-Shot Image Captioning
AI Platform OneNexus, OneMount（OneMount AI平台OneNexus）；School of Electronic Engineering, Soongsil University（崇实大学电子工程学院）；MoAdata（MoAdata公司）；University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City (UEH)（胡志明市经济大学）
SEMT: Static-Expansion-Mesh Transformer Network Architecture for Remote Sensing Image Captioning
Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究院）；University of Technology of Troyes（图卢兹技术大学）；Ho Chi Minh University of Technology（胡志明技术大学）；Ton Duc Thang University（-ton Duc Thang大学）
Indian Institute of Technology Dharwad（达尔瓦德印度理工学院）；UltraInstinct AI
Video captioning is a popular task that challenges models to describe events in videos using natural language. In this work, we investigate the ability of various visual feature representations derived from state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks to capture high-level semantic context. We introduce the Weighted Additive Fusion Transformer with Memory Augmented Encoders (WAFTM), a captioning model that incorporates memory in a transformer encoder and uses a novel method, to fuse features, that ensures due importance is given to more significant representations. We illustrate a gain in pe…
Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Image captioning has conventionally relied on reference-based automatic evaluations, where machine captions are compared against captions written by humans. This is in contrast to the reference-free manner in which humans assess caption quality. In this paper, we report the surprising empirical finding that CLIP (Radford et al., 2021), a cross-modal model pretrained on 400M image+caption pairs from the web, can be used for robust automatic evaluation of image captioning without the need for references. Experiments spanning several corpora demonstrate that our new reference-free metric, CLIPSco…
Novel Object Captioning is a zero-shot Image Captioning task requiring describing objects not seen in the training captions, but for which information is available from external object detectors. The key challenge is to select and describe all salient detected novel objects in the input images. In this paper, we focus on this challenge and propose the ECOL-R model (Encouraging Copying of Object Labels with Reinforced Learning), a copy-augmented transformer model that is encouraged to accurately describe the novel object labels. This is achieved via a specialised reward function in the SCST rei…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Diverse and accurate vision+language modeling is an important goal to retain creative freedom and maintain user engagement. However, adequately capturing the intricacies of diversity in language models is challenging. Recent works commonly resort to latent variable models augmented with more or less supervision from object detectors or part-of-speech tags. Common to all those methods is the fact that the latent variable either only initializes the sentence generation process or is identical across the steps of generation. Both methods offer no fine-grained control. To address this concern, we …
DualCap: Enhancing Lightweight Image Captioning via Dual Retrieval with Similar Scenes Visual Prompts
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络安全学院）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Automatically describing a video with natural language is regarded as a fundamental challenge in computer vision. The problem nevertheless is not trivial especially when a video contains multiple events to be worthy of mention, which often happens in real videos. A valid question is how to temporally localize and then describe events, which is known as "dense video captioning." In this paper, we present a novel framework for dense video captioning that unifies the localization of temporal event proposals and sentence generation of each proposal, by jointly training them in an end-to-end manner…
Remote Sensing Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Bridging Remote Sensing Imagery and Comprehensive Knowledge with a Multi-Modal Dataset and Retrieval-Augmented Generation Model
School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（信息科学技术学院，中国科学技术大学）；China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology（电子信息技术研究院）
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Baidu Inc（百度公司）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
The task of image captioning aims to generate captions directly from images via the automatically learned cross-modal generator. To build a well-performing generator, existing approaches usually need a large number of described images, which requires a huge effects on manual labeling. However, in real-world applications, a more general scenario is that we only have limited amount of described images and a large number of undescribed images. Therefore, a resulting challenge is how to effectively combine the undescribed images into the learning of cross-modal generator. To solve this problem, we…
HiTZ Basque Center for Language Technologies（HiTZ巴斯克语言技术中心）；University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学（UPV/EHU））
Integrating outside knowledge for reasoning in visio-linguistic tasks such as visual question answering (VQA) is an open problem. Given that pretrained language models have been shown to include world knowledge, we propose to use a unimodal (text-only) train and inference procedure based on automatic off-the-shelf captioning of images and pretrained language models. Our results on a visual question answering task which requires external knowledge (OK-VQA) show that our text-only model outperforms pretrained multimodal (image-text) models of comparable number of parameters. In contrast, our mod…
UNC Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI（微软Dynamics 365人工智能部门）
Generating multi-sentence descriptions for videos is one of the most challenging captioning tasks due to its high requirements for not only visual relevance but also discourse-based coherence across the sentences in the paragraph. Towards this goal, we propose a new approach called Memory-Augmented Recurrent Transformer (MART), which uses a memory module to augment the transformer architecture. The memory module generates a highly summarized memory state from the video segments and the sentence history so as to help better prediction of the next sentence (w.r.t. coreference and repetition aspe…
FingerCap: Fine-grained Finger-level Hand Motion Captioning
Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Peking University（北京大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；City University of Macau（澳门城市大学）
RAVENEA: A Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Visual Culture Understanding
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
