网页链接：https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=all&query=image+captioning&abstracts=show&size=50&order=announced_date_first
- 本篇博客列举了发表在 arXiv 上与 Image Captioning 方向相关的论文。
- 博客中对每篇论文的总结主要关注论文的摘要部分，重点论文以“★”或“☆”标注（重要程度：★>☆）。
论文列表
- arXiv:1409.2329 <Recurrent Neural Network Regularization> ☆：提出了一种 RNN/LSTM 的正则化方法。
We present a simple regularization technique for Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units. Dropout, the most successful technique for regularizing neural networks, does not work well with RNNs and LSTMs. In this paper, we show how to correctly apply dropout to LSTMs, and show that it substantially reduces overfitting on a variety of tasks. These tasks include language modeling, speech recognition, image captiongeneration, and machine translation.
- arXiv:1411.4555 <Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator> ★：使用深度神经网络解决 Image Captioning 任务；向 Image Captioning 领域引入“编码器-解码器（Encoder-Deocder）”框架。
Automatically describing the content of an image is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence that connects computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we present a generative model based on a deep recurrent architecture that combines recent advances in computer vision and machine translation and that can be used to generate natural sentences describing an image. The model is trained to maximize the likelihood of the target description sentence given the training image. Experiments on several datasets show the accuracy of the model and the fluency of the language it learns solely from image descriptions. Our model is often quite accurate, which we verify both qualitatively and quantitatively. For instance, while the current state-of-the-art BLEU-1 score (the higher the better) on the Pascal dataset is 25, our approach yields 59, to be compared to human performance around 69. We also show BLEU-1 score improvements on Flickr30k, from 56 to 66, and on SBU, from 19 to 28. Lastly, on the newly released COCO dataset, we achieve a BLEU-4 of 27.7, which is the current state-of-the-art.
- arXiv:1411.4952 <From Captions to Visual Concepts and Back>：使用多实例学习（Multi Instance Learning）的方法从图片中提取单词（Word Detectors）；采用传统的语言建模方式；使用句子级特征和一个深度多模态相似性模型对生成的描述进行重排序。
This paper presents a novel approach for automatically generating image descriptions: visual detectors, language models, and multimodal similarity models learnt directly from a dataset of image captions. We use multiple instance learning to train visual detectors for words that commonly occur in captions, including many different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The word detector outputs serve as conditional inputs to a maximum-entropy language model. The language model learns from a set of over 400,000 image descriptions to capture the statistics of word usage. We capture global semantics by re-ranking caption candidates using sentence-level features and a deep multimodal similarity model. Our system is state-of-the-art on the official Microsoft COCO benchmark, producing a BLEU-4 score of 29.1%. When human judges compare the system captions to ones written by other people on our held-out test set, the system captions have equal or better quality 34% of the time.
- arXiv:1411.5654 <Learning a Recurrent Visual Representation for Image Caption Generation>：探索了图像与描述之间的双向映射。
In this paper we explore the bi-directional mapping between images and their sentence-based descriptions. We propose learning this mapping using a recurrent neural network. Unlike previous approaches that map both sentences and images to a common embedding, we enable the generation of novel sentences given an image. Using the same model, we can also reconstruct the visual features associated with an image given its visual description. We use a novel recurrent visual memory that automatically learns to remember long-term visual concepts to aid in both sentence generation and visual feature reconstruction. We evaluate our approach on several tasks. These include sentence generation, sentence retrieval and image retrieval. State-of-the-art results are shown for the task of generating novel image descriptions. When compared to human generated captions, our automatically generated captions are preferred by humans over 19.8% of the time. Results are better than or comparable to state-of-the-art results on the image and sentence retrieval tasks for methods using similar visual features.
- arXiv:1412.6632 <Deep Captioning with Multimodal Recurrent Neural Networks (m-RNN)>：提出了一种多模态循环神经网络（multimodal Recurrent Neural Network，m-RNN），多模态层连接了语言模型部分和视觉部分。
In this paper, we present a multimodal Recurrent Neural Network (m-RNN) model for generating novel image captions. It directly models the probability distribution of generating a word given previous words and an image. Image captions are generated by sampling from this distribution. The model consists of two sub-networks: a deep recurrent neural network for sentences and a deep convolutional network for images. These two sub-networks interact with each other in a multimodal layer to form the whole m-RNN model. The effectiveness of our model is validated on four benchmark datasets (IAPR TC-12, Flickr 8K, Flickr 30K and MS COCO). Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we apply the m-RNN model to retrieval tasks for retrieving images or sentences, and achieves significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art methods which directly optimize the ranking objective function for retrieval. The project page of this work is: www.stat.ucla.edu/~junhua.mao/m-RNN.html .
- arXiv:1412.8419 <Simple Image Description Generator via a Linear Phrase-Based Approach>：在图像特征与短语表示（phrase representations）之间学习了一个公共空间（common space）。
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 captionsyntax statistics, we propose a simple language model that can produce relevant descriptions for a given test image using the phrases inferred. Our approach, which is considerably simpler than state-of-the-art models, achieves comparable results on the recently release Microsoft COCO dataset.
- arXiv:1502.03044 <Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention> ★：向 Image Captioning 领域引入了注意力机制（Attention Mechanism），提出了 Hard Attention 与 Soft Attention。
Inspired by recent work in machine translation and object detection, we introduce an attention based model that automatically learns to describe the content of images. We describe how we can train this model in a deterministic manner using standard backpropagation techniques and stochastically by maximizing a variational lower bound. We also show through visualization how the model is able to automatically learn to fix its gaze on salient objects while generating the corresponding words in the output sequence. We validate the use of attention with state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets: Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MS COCO.
- arXiv:1504.00325 <Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server> ★：介绍了 MS COCO 数据集，以及评价系统。
In this paper we describe the Microsoft COCO Caption dataset and evaluation server. When completed, the dataset will contain over one and a half million captions describing over 330,000 images. For the training and validation images, five independent human generated captions will be provided. To ensure consistency in evaluation of automatic caption generation algorithms, an evaluation server is used. The evaluation server receives candidate captions and scores them using several popular metrics, including BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE and CIDEr. Instructions for using the evaluation server are provided.
- arXiv:1504:06692 <Learning like a Child: Fast Novel Visual Concept Learning from Sentence Descriptions of Images>：提出了一种权重转置共享（Transposed Weight Sharing，TWS）的策略，处理新概念学习（novel concept learning）任务。
In this paper, we address the task of learning novel visual concepts, and their interactions with other concepts, from a few images with sentence descriptions. Using linguistic context and visual features, our method is able to efficiently hypothesize the semantic meaning of new words and add them to its word dictionary so that they can be used to describe images which contain these novel concepts. Our method has an image captioning module based on m-RNN with several improvements. In particular, we propose a transposed weight sharing scheme, which not only improves performance on imagecaptioning, but also makes the model more suitable for the novel concept learning task. We propose methods to prevent overfitting the new concepts. In addition, three novel concept datasets are constructed for this new task. In the experiments, we show that our method effectively learns novel visual concepts from a few examples without disturbing the previously learned concepts. The project page is http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~junhua.mao/projects/child_learning.html
- arXiv:1505.01809 <Language Models for Image Captioning: The Quirks and What Works>：对比了基于检测器的模型（Detector Conditioned Models）与多模态循环神经网络（Multimodal Recurrent Neural Network）在处理 Image Captioning 任务上的效果，通过结合二者的关键部分得到了一个更优的结果。
Two recent approaches have achieved state-of-the-art results in image captioning. The first uses a pipelined process where a set of candidate words is generated by a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on images, and then a maximum entropy (ME) language model is used to arrange these words into a coherent sentence. The second uses the penultimate activation layer of the CNN as input to a recurrent neural network (RNN) that then generates the caption sequence. In this paper, we compare the merits of these different language modeling approaches for the first time by using the same state-of-the-art CNN as input. We examine issues in the different approaches, including linguistic irregularities, caption repetition, and data set overlap. By combining key aspects of the ME and RNN methods, we achieve a new record performance over previously published results on the benchmark COCO dataset. However, the gains we see in BLEU do not translate to human judgments.
- arXiv:1505.04467 <Exploring Nearest Neighbor Approaches for Image Captioning>：探索了最近邻方法在 Image Captioning 任务中的应用。
We explore a variety of nearest neighbor baseline approaches for image captioning. These approaches find a set of nearest neighbor images in the training set from which a caption may be borrowed for the query image. We select a caption for the query image by finding the caption that best represents the "consensus" of the set of candidate captions gathered from the nearest neighbor images. When measured by automatic evaluation metrics on the MS COCO caption evaluation server, these approaches perform as well as many recent approaches that generate novel captions. However, human studies show that a method that generates novel captions is still preferred over the nearest neighbor approach.
- arXiv:1505.04870 <Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models>：为 Flickr30k 数据集提供了更丰富的标注信息。
The Flickr30k dataset has become a standard benchmark for sentence-based image description. This paper presents Flickr30k Entities, which augments the 158k captions from Flickr30k with 244k coreference chains, linking mentions of the same entities across different captions for the same image, and associating them with 276k manually annotated bounding boxes. Such annotations are essential for continued progress in automatic imagedescription and grounded language understanding. They enable us to define a new benchmark for localization of textual entity mentions in an image. We present a strong baseline for this task that combines an image-text embedding, detectors for common objects, a color classifier, and a bias towards selecting larger objects. While our baseline rivals in accuracy more complex state-of-the-art models, we show that its gains cannot be easily parlayed into improvements on such tasks as image-sentence retrieval, thus underlining the limitations of current methods and the need for further research.
- arXiv:1506.00019 <A Critical Review of Recurrent Neural Networks for Sequence Learning> ☆：RNN 介绍。
Countless learning tasks require dealing with sequential data. Image captioning, speech synthesis, and music generation all require that a model produce outputs that are sequences. In other domains, such as time series prediction, video analysis, and musical information retrieval, a model must learn from inputs that are sequences. Interactive tasks, such as translating natural language, engaging in dialogue, and controlling a robot, often demand both capabilities. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are connectionist models that capture the dynamics of sequences via cycles in the network of nodes. Unlike standard feedforward neural networks, recurrent networks retain a state that can represent information from an arbitrarily long context window. Although recurrent neural networks have traditionally been difficult to train, and often contain millions of parameters, recent advances in network architectures, optimization techniques, and parallel computation have enabled successful large-scale learning with them. In recent years, systems based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional (BRNN) architectures have demonstrated ground-breaking performance on tasks as varied as image captioning, language translation, and handwriting recognition. In this survey, we review and synthesize the research that over the past three decades first yielded and then made practical these powerful learning models. When appropriate, we reconcile conflicting notation and nomenclature. Our goal is to provide a self-contained explication of the state of the art together with a historical perspective and references to primary research.
- arXiv:1506.01144 <What Value Do Explicit High Level Concepts Have in Vision to Language Problems?> ★：使用了一个属性预测器对图片进行多标签分类，将分类的结果传入语言模型。
Much of the recent progress in Vision-to-Language (V2L) problems has been achieved through a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). This approach does not explicitly represent high-level semantic concepts, but rather seeks to progress directly from image features to text. We propose here a method of incorporating high-level concepts into the very successful CNN-RNN approach, and show that it achieves a significant improvement on the state-of-the-art performance in both image captioning and visual question answering. We also show that the same mechanism can be used to introduce external semantic information and that doing so further improves performance. In doing so we provide an analysis of the value of high level semantic information in V2L problems.
- arXiv:1506.03099 <Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks> ☆：介绍了解码器（decoder）在采样时的一种新方法——课程学习（Curriculum Learning），对应的采样方法叫做“计划采样（Scheduled Sampling）”。
Recurrent Neural Networks can be trained to produce sequences of tokens given some input, as exemplified by recent results in machine translation and image captioning. The current approach to training them consists of maximizing the likelihood of each token in the sequence given the current (recurrent) state and the previous token. At inference, the unknown previous token is then replaced by a token generated by the model itself. This discrepancy between training and inference can yield errors that can accumulate quickly along the generated sequence. We propose a curriculum learning strategy to gently change the training process from a fully guided scheme using the true previous token, towards a less guided scheme which mostly uses the generated token instead. Experiments on several sequence prediction tasks show that this approach yields significant improvements. Moreover, it was used successfully in our winning entry to the MSCOCO image captioning challenge, 2015.
- arXiv:1506.06272 <Aligning where to see and what to tell: image caption with region-based attention and scene factorization> ★：使用基于区域的注意力机制（region-based attention）和场景分解（scene factorization）完成图像标注任务。
Recent progress on automatic generation of image captions has shown that it is possible to describe the most salient information conveyed by images with accurate and meaningful sentences. In this paper, we propose an image caption system that exploits the parallel structures between imagesand sentences. In our model, the process of generating the next word, given the previously generated ones, is aligned with the visual perception experience where the attention shifting among the visual regions imposes a thread of visual ordering. This alignment characterizes the flow of "abstract meaning", encoding what is semantically shared by both the visual scene and the text description. Our system also makes another novel modeling contribution by introducing scene-specific contexts that capture higher-level semantic information encoded in an image. The contexts adapt language models for word generation to specific scene types. We benchmark our system and contrast to published results on several popular datasets. We show that using either region-based attention or scene-specific contexts improves systems without those components. Furthermore, combining these two modeling ingredients attains the state-of-the-art performance.