833 research outputs found
What is the Role of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in an Image Caption Generator?
In neural image captioning systems, a recurrent neural network (RNN) is
typically viewed as the primary `generation' component. This view suggests that
the image features should be `injected' into the RNN. This is in fact the
dominant view in the literature. Alternatively, the RNN can instead be viewed
as only encoding the previously generated words. This view suggests that the
RNN should only be used to encode linguistic features and that only the final
representation should be `merged' with the image features at a later stage.
This paper compares these two architectures. We find that, in general, late
merging outperforms injection, suggesting that RNNs are better viewed as
encoders, rather than generators.Comment: Appears in: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on
Natural Language Generation (INLG'17
Areas of Attention for Image Captioning
We propose "Areas of Attention", a novel attention-based model for automatic
image captioning. Our approach models the dependencies between image regions,
caption words, and the state of an RNN language model, using three pairwise
interactions. In contrast to previous attention-based approaches that associate
image regions only to the RNN state, our method allows a direct association
between caption words and image regions. During training these associations are
inferred from image-level captions, akin to weakly-supervised object detector
training. These associations help to improve captioning by localizing the
corresponding regions during testing. We also propose and compare different
ways of generating attention areas: CNN activation grids, object proposals, and
spatial transformers nets applied in a convolutional fashion. Spatial
transformers give the best results. They allow for image specific attention
areas, and can be trained jointly with the rest of the network. Our attention
mechanism and spatial transformer attention areas together yield
state-of-the-art results on the MSCOCO dataset.o meaningful latent semantic
structure in the generated captions.Comment: Accepted in ICCV 201
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