MAT: A Multimodal Attentive Translator for Image Captioning

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 sequence of the RNN model. To represent the image in a sequential way, we extract the objects features in the image and arrange them in a order using convolutional neural networks. To further leverage the visual information from the encoded objects, a sequential attention layer is introduced to selectively attend to the objects that are related to generate corresponding words in the sentences. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the proposed approach on popular benchmark dataset, i.e., MS COCO, and the proposed model surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in all metrics following the dataset splits of previous work. The proposed approach is also evaluated by the evaluation server of MS COCO captioning challenge, and achieves very competitive results, e.g., a CIDEr of 1.029 (c5) and 1.064 (c40)

Energy dependence of Normal Branch Oscillation in Scorpius X-1

We report the energy dependence of normal branch oscillations (NBOs) in Scorpius X-1, a low-mass X-ray binary Z-source. Three characteristic quantities (centroid frequency, quality factor, and fractional root-mean-squared (rms) amplitude) of a quasi-periodic oscillation signal as functions of photon energy are investigated. We found that, although it is not yet statistically well established, there is a signature indicating that the NBO centroid frequency decreases with increasing photon energy when it is below 6-8 keV, which turns out to be positively correlated with the photon energy at the higher energy side. In addition, the rms amplitude increases significantly with the photon energy below 13 keV and then decreases in the energy band of 13-20 keV. There is no clear dependence on photon energy for the quality factor. Based on these results, we suggest that the NBO originates mainly in the transition layer.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure