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

Reversible Recursive Instance-level Object Segmentation

In this work, we propose a novel Reversible Recursive Instance-level Object Segmentation (R2-IOS) framework to address the challenging instance-level object segmentation task. R2-IOS consists of a reversible proposal refinement sub-network that predicts bounding box offsets for refining the object proposal locations, and an instance-level segmentation sub-network that generates the foreground mask of the dominant object instance in each proposal. By being recursive, R2-IOS iteratively optimizes the two sub-networks during joint training, in which the refined object proposals and improved segmentation predictions are alternately fed into each other to progressively increase the network capabilities. By being reversible, the proposal refinement sub-network adaptively determines an optimal number of refinement iterations required for each proposal during both training and testing. Furthermore, to handle multiple overlapped instances within a proposal, an instance-aware denoising autoencoder is introduced into the segmentation sub-network to distinguish the dominant object from other distracting instances. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 benchmark well demonstrate the superiority of R2-IOS over other state-of-the-art methods. In particular, the $\text{AP}^r$ over $20$ classes at $0.5$ IoU achieves $66.7\%$, which significantly outperforms the results of $58.7\%$ by PFN~\cite{PFN} and $46.3\%$ by~\cite{liu2015multi}.Comment: 9 page