Simao Herdade

Eric Dodds, Jack Culpepper, Simao Herdade et al.

Image retrieval with natural language feedback offers the promise of catalog search based on fine-grained visual features that go beyond objects and binary attributes, facilitating real-world applications such as e-commerce. Our Modality-Agnostic Attention Fusion (MAAF) model combines image and text features and outperforms existing approaches on two visual search with modifying phrase datasets, Fashion IQ and CSS, and performs competitively on a dataset with only single-word modifications, Fashion200k. We also introduce two new challenging benchmarks adapted from Birds-to-Words and Spot-the-Diff, which provide new settings with rich language inputs, and we show that our approach without modification outperforms strong baselines. To better understand our model, we conduct detailed ablations on Fashion IQ and provide visualizations of the surprising phenomenon of words avoiding "attending" to the image region they refer to.

Simao Herdade, Armin Kappeler, Kofi Boakye et al.

Image captioning models typically follow an encoder-decoder architecture which uses abstract image feature vectors as input to the encoder. One of the most successful algorithms uses feature vectors extracted from the region proposals obtained from an object detector. In this work we introduce the Object Relation Transformer, that builds upon this approach by explicitly incorporating information about the spatial relationship between input detected objects through geometric attention. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the importance of such geometric attention for image captioning, leading to improvements on all common captioning metrics on the MS-COCO dataset.