Weining Wang

Qi Li, Weining Wang, Chengzhong Xu et al.

Although face swapping has attracted much attention in recent years, it remains a challenging problem. Existing methods leverage a large number of data samples to explore the intrinsic properties of face swapping without considering the semantic information of face images. Moreover, the representation of the identity information tends to be fixed, leading to suboptimal face swapping. In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient method named FaceSwapper, for one-shot face swapping based on Generative Adversarial Networks. Our method consists of a disentangled representation module and a semantic-guided fusion module. The disentangled representation module comprises an attribute encoder and an identity encoder, which aims to achieve the disentanglement of the identity and attribute information. The identity encoder is more flexible, and the attribute encoder contains more attribute details than its competitors. Benefiting from the disentangled representation, FaceSwapper can swap face images progressively. In addition, semantic information is introduced into the semantic-guided fusion module to control the swapped region and model the pose and expression more accurately. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets with fewer training samples. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/liqi-casia/FaceSwapper.

Qi Li, Weining Wang, Shuangjun Du et al.

Face swapping has witnessed significant progress in recent years, largely driven by advances in deep generative models such as GANs and diffusion models.Despite these advances, existing methods remain fragmented across different paradigms, and their evaluation is highly inconsistent due to the lack of standardized datasets and protocols. Moreover, prior surveys primarily focus on broader deepfake generation or detection, leaving face swapping insufficiently studied as a standalone problem. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and benchmark for face swapping. We provide a structured review of existing methods, organizing them into five major paradigms and systematically analyzing their design principles, strengths, and limitations. To enable fair and controlled evaluation, we introduce CASIA FaceSwapping, a high-quality benchmark with balanced demographic distributions and explicit attribute variations, and establish standardized protocols to assess the robustness of different face swapping methods. Extensive experiments on representative approaches yield new insights into the performance characteristics and limitations of current techniques. Overall, our work provides a unified perspective and a principled evaluation framework to facilitate the development of more robust and controllable face swapping methods. More results can be found at https://github.com/CASIA-NLPRAI/face-swapping-survey.

Jiawei Liu, Weining Wang, Sihan Chen et al.

As a combination of visual and audio signals, video is inherently multi-modal. However, existing video generation methods are primarily intended for the synthesis of visual frames, whereas audio signals in realistic videos are disregarded. In this work, we concentrate on a rarely investigated problem of text guided sounding video generation and propose the Sounding Video Generator (SVG), a unified framework for generating realistic videos along with audio signals. Specifically, we present the SVG-VQGAN to transform visual frames and audio melspectrograms into discrete tokens. SVG-VQGAN applies a novel hybrid contrastive learning method to model inter-modal and intra-modal consistency and improve the quantized representations. A cross-modal attention module is employed to extract associated features of visual frames and audio signals for contrastive learning. Then, a Transformer-based decoder is used to model associations between texts, visual frames, and audio signals at token level for auto-regressive sounding video generation. AudioSetCap, a human annotated text-video-audio paired dataset, is produced for training SVG. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method when compared with existing textto-video generation methods as well as audio generation methods on Kinetics and VAS datasets.

Jing Liu, Sihan Chen, Xingjian He et al.

In this paper, we propose a Vision-Audio-Language Omni-peRception pretraining model (VALOR) for multi-modal understanding and generation. Different from widely-studied vision-language pretraining models, VALOR jointly models relationships of vision, audio and language in an end-to-end manner. It contains three separate encoders for single modality representations, and a decoder for multimodal conditional text generation. We design two pretext tasks to pretrain VALOR model, including Multimodal Grouping Alignment (MGA) and Multimodal Grouping Captioning (MGC). MGA projects vision, language and audio to the same common space, building vision-language, audio-language and audiovisual-language alignment simultaneously. MGC learns how to generate text tokens in conditions of vision, audio or their both. To promote vision-audio-language pretraining research, we construct a large-scale high-quality tri-modality dataset named VALOR-1M, which contains 1M audiable videos with human annotated audiovisual captions. Extensive experiments show that VALOR can learn strong multimodal correlations and be generalized to various downstream tasks (e.g., retrieval, captioning and question answering), with different input modalities (e.g., vision-language, audio-language and audiovisual-language). VALOR achieves new state-of-the-art performances on series of public cross-modality benchmarks. Code and data are available at project page https://casia-iva-group.github.io/projects/VALOR.

Mingzhen Sun, Weining Wang, Zihan Qin et al.

Video generation necessitates both global coherence and local realism. This work presents a novel non-autoregressive method GLOBER, which first generates global features to obtain comprehensive global guidance and then synthesizes video frames based on the global features to generate coherent videos. Specifically, we propose a video auto-encoder, where a video encoder encodes videos into global features, and a video decoder, built on a diffusion model, decodes the global features and synthesizes video frames in a non-autoregressive manner. To achieve maximum flexibility, our video decoder perceives temporal information through normalized frame indexes, which enables it to synthesize arbitrary sub video clips with predetermined starting and ending frame indexes. Moreover, a novel adversarial loss is introduced to improve the global coherence and local realism between the synthesized video frames. Finally, we employ a diffusion-based video generator to fit the global features outputted by the video encoder for video generation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method, and new state-of-the-art results have been achieved on multiple benchmarks.

Mingzhen Sun, Weining Wang, Xinxin Zhu et al.

Motion, scene and object are three primary visual components of a video. In particular, objects represent the foreground, scenes represent the background, and motion traces their dynamics. Based on this insight, we propose a two-stage MOtion, Scene and Object decomposition framework (MOSO) for video prediction, consisting of MOSO-VQVAE and MOSO-Transformer. In the first stage, MOSO-VQVAE decomposes a previous video clip into the motion, scene and object components, and represents them as distinct groups of discrete tokens. Then, in the second stage, MOSO-Transformer predicts the object and scene tokens of the subsequent video clip based on the previous tokens and adds dynamic motion at the token level to the generated object and scene tokens. Our framework can be easily extended to unconditional video generation and video frame interpolation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on five challenging benchmarks for video prediction and unconditional video generation: BAIR, RoboNet, KTH, KITTI and UCF101. In addition, MOSO can produce realistic videos by combining objects and scenes from different videos.

Yushuai Song, Weize Quan, Weining Wang et al.

Recent advances in generative super-resolution (SR) have greatly improved visual realism, yet existing evaluation and optimization frameworks remain misaligned with human perception. Full-Reference and No-Reference metrics often fail to reflect perceptual preference, either penalizing semantically plausible details due to pixel misalignment or favoring visually sharp but inconsistent artifacts. Moreover, most SR methods rely on ground-truth (GT)-dependent distribution matching, which does not necessarily correspond to human judgments. In this work, we propose RefReward-SR, a low-resolution (LR) reference-aware reward model for preference-aligned SR. Instead of relying on GT supervision or NR evaluation, RefReward-SR assesses high-resolution (HR) reconstructions conditioned on their LR inputs, treating the LR image as a semantic anchor. Leveraging the visual-linguistic priors of a Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM), it evaluates semantic consistency and plausibility in a reasoning-aware manner. To support this paradigm, we construct RefSR-18K, the first large-scale LR-conditioned preference dataset for SR, providing pairwise rankings based on LR-HR consistency and HR naturalness. We fine-tune the MLLM with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using LR-conditioned ranking rewards, and further integrate GRPO into SR model training with RefReward-SR as the core reward signal for preference-aligned generation. Extensive experiments show that our framework achieves substantially better alignment with human judgments, producing reconstructions that preserve semantic consistency while enhancing perceptual plausibility and visual naturalness. Code, models, and datasets will be released upon paper acceptance.

Jiahui Sun, Weining Wang, Mingzhen Sun et al.

Sounding Video Generation (SVG) remains a challenging task due to the inherent structural misalignment between audio and video, as well as the high computational cost of multimodal data processing. In this paper, we introduce ProAV-DiT, a Projected Latent Diffusion Transformer designed for efficient and synchronized audio-video generation. To address structural inconsistencies, we preprocess raw audio into video-like representations, aligning both the temporal and spatial dimensions between audio and video. At its core, ProAV-DiT adopts a Multi-scale Dual-stream Spatio-Temporal Autoencoder (MDSA), which projects both modalities into a unified latent space using orthogonal decomposition, enabling fine-grained spatiotemporal modeling and semantic alignment. To further enhance temporal coherence and modality-specific fusion, we introduce a multi-scale attention mechanism, which consists of multi-scale temporal self-attention and group cross-modal attention. Furthermore, we stack the 2D latents from MDSA into a unified 3D latent space, which is processed by a spatio-temporal diffusion Transformer. This design efficiently models spatiotemporal dependencies, enabling the generation of high-fidelity synchronized audio-video content while reducing computational overhead. Extensive experiments conducted on standard benchmarks demonstrate that ProAV-DiT outperforms existing methods in both generation quality and computational efficiency.

Zhiwei Li, Jiacheng Xue, Weining Wang et al.

Vision-language models like CLIP have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot transfer capabilities. However, their susceptibility to imperceptible adversarial perturbations remains a critical security concern. While test-time defenses offer a pragmatic solution for deployed models, existing approaches typically rely on gradient-based optimization during inference, incurring significant computational overhead. In this paper, we revisit the role of data augmentation in CLIP robustness and observe that augmentations are not equally effective: specific augmentations consistently provide robust geometric cues that align with correct class semantics in the hyperspherical feature space. Based on this, we propose Adaptive Geodesic Correction (AGC), a training-free defense mechanism that requires no parameter updates. AGC identifies a reliable augmentation as a geometric anchor and corrects the input feature towards it, utilizing an adaptive step size to balance robustness against clean accuracy preservation. AGC achieves superior performance across eight fine-grained datasets and three CLIP backbones, improving average robust accuracy by 44.4\% over state-of-the-art baseline while delivering a 10$\times$ reduction in inference latency. Our findings reveal a fundamental geometric property of CLIP features, offering a highly efficient and effective paradigm for robust multimodal deployment.

Zhiwei Li, Yitian Pang, Weining Wang et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have achieved impressive zero-shot recognition performance but remain highly susceptible to adversarial perturbations, posing significant risks in safety-critical scenarios. Previous training-time defenses rely on adversarial fine-tuning, which requires labeled data and costly retraining, while existing test-time strategies fail to reliably distinguish between clean and adversarial inputs, thereby preventing both adversarial robustness and clean accuracy from reaching their optimum. To address these limitations, we propose Test-Time Padding (TTP), a lightweight defense framework that performs adversarial detection followed by targeted adaptation at inference. TTP identifies adversarial inputs via the cosine similarity shift between CLIP feature embeddings computed before and after spatial padding, yielding a universal threshold for reliable detection across architectures and datasets. For detected adversarial cases, TTP employs trainable padding to restore disrupted attention patterns, coupled with a similarity-aware ensemble strategy for a more robust final prediction. For clean inputs, TTP leaves them unchanged by default or optionally integrates existing test-time adaptation techniques for further accuracy gains. Comprehensive experiments on diverse CLIP backbones and fine-grained benchmarks show that TTP consistently surpasses state-of-the-art test-time defenses, delivering substantial improvements in adversarial robustness without compromising clean accuracy. The code for this paper will be released soon.

Xinyang Song, Libin Wang, Weining Wang et al.

Recent image generation approaches often address subject, style, and structure-driven conditioning in isolation, leading to feature entanglement and limited task transferability. In this paper, we introduce 3SGen, a task-aware unified framework that performs all three conditioning modes within a single model. 3SGen employs an MLLM equipped with learnable semantic queries to align text-image semantics, complemented by a VAE branch that preserves fine-grained visual details. At its core, an Adaptive Task-specific Memory (ATM) module dynamically disentangles, stores, and retrieves condition-specific priors, such as identity for subjects, textures for styles, and spatial layouts for structures, via a lightweight gating mechanism along with several scalable memory items. This design mitigates inter-task interference and naturally scales to compositional inputs. In addition, we propose 3SGen-Bench, a unified image-driven generation benchmark with standardized metrics for evaluating cross-task fidelity and controllability. Extensive experiments on our proposed 3SGen-Bench and other public benchmarks demonstrate our superior performance across diverse image-driven generation tasks.

Mingzhen Sun, Weining Wang, Gen Li et al.

The task of video generation requires synthesizing visually realistic and temporally coherent video frames. Existing methods primarily use asynchronous auto-regressive models or synchronous diffusion models to address this challenge. However, asynchronous auto-regressive models often suffer from inconsistencies between training and inference, leading to issues such as error accumulation, while synchronous diffusion models are limited by their reliance on rigid sequence length. To address these issues, we introduce Auto-Regressive Diffusion (AR-Diffusion), a novel model that combines the strengths of auto-regressive and diffusion models for flexible, asynchronous video generation. Specifically, our approach leverages diffusion to gradually corrupt video frames in both training and inference, reducing the discrepancy between these phases. Inspired by auto-regressive generation, we incorporate a non-decreasing constraint on the corruption timesteps of individual frames, ensuring that earlier frames remain clearer than subsequent ones. This setup, together with temporal causal attention, enables flexible generation of videos with varying lengths while preserving temporal coherence. In addition, we design two specialized timestep schedulers: the FoPP scheduler for balanced timestep sampling during training, and the AD scheduler for flexible timestep differences during inference, supporting both synchronous and asynchronous generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, which achieves competitive and state-of-the-art results across four challenging benchmarks.

Peiyao Wang, Weining Wang, Qi Li

Recent advances in text-to-video generation have achieved impressive perceptual quality, yet generated content often violates fundamental principles of physical plausibility - manifesting as implausible object dynamics, incoherent interactions, and unrealistic motion patterns. Such failures hinder the deployment of video generation models in embodied AI, robotics, and simulation-intensive domains. To bridge this gap, we propose PhysCorr, a unified framework for modeling, evaluating, and optimizing physical consistency in video generation. Specifically, we introduce PhysicsRM, the first dual-dimensional reward model that quantifies both intra-object stability and inter-object interactions. On this foundation, we develop PhyDPO, a novel direct preference optimization pipeline that leverages contrastive feedback and physics-aware reweighting to guide generation toward physically coherent outputs. Our approach is model-agnostic and scalable, enabling seamless integration into a wide range of video diffusion and transformer-based backbones. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PhysCorr achieves significant improvements in physical realism while preserving visual fidelity and semantic alignment. This work takes a critical step toward physically grounded and trustworthy video generation.

Qianshan Wei, Yishan Yang, Siyi Wang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are evolving from passive observers into active agents, solving problems through Visual Expansion (invoking visual tools) and Knowledge Expansion (open-web search). However, existing evaluations fall short: they lack flexible tool integration, test visual and search tools separately, and evaluate primarily by final answers. Consequently, they cannot verify if tools were actually invoked, applied correctly, or used efficiently. To address this, we introduce Agentic-MME, a process-verified benchmark for Multimodal Agentic Capabilities. It contains 418 real-world tasks across 6 domains and 3 difficulty levels to evaluate capability synergy, featuring over 2,000 stepwise checkpoints that average 10+ person-hours of manual annotation per task. Each task includes a unified evaluation framework supporting sandboxed code and APIs, alongside a human reference trajectory annotated with stepwise checkpoints along dual-axis: S-axis and V-axis. To enable true process-level verification, we audit fine-grained intermediate states rather than just final answers, and quantify efficiency via an overthinking metric relative to human trajectories. Experimental results show the best model, Gemini3-pro, achieves 56.3% overall accuracy, which falls significantly to 23.0% on Level-3 tasks, underscoring the difficulty of real-world multimodal agentic problem solving.

Shiyu Wu, Mingzhen Sun, Weining Wang et al.

Since there exists a notable gap between user-provided and model-preferred prompts, generating high-quality and satisfactory images using diffusion models often requires prompt engineering to optimize user inputs. Current studies on text-to-image prompt engineering can effectively enhance the style and aesthetics of generated images. However, they often neglect the semantic alignment between generated images and user descriptions, resulting in visually appealing but content-wise unsatisfying outputs. In this work, we propose VisualPrompter, a novel training-free prompt engineering framework that refines user inputs to model-preferred sentences. In particular, VisualPrompter utilizes an automatic self-reflection module to identify the missing concepts in generated images and a target-specific prompt optimization mechanism to revise the prompts in a fine-grained manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our VisualPrompter, which achieves new state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks for text-image alignment evaluation. Additionally, our framework features a plug-and-play design, making it highly adaptable to various generative models.

Fangling Jiang, Qi Li, Weining Wang et al.

Recently the emergence of novel presentation attacks has drawn increasing attention to face anti-spoofing. However, existing methods tend to memorize data patterns from the training set, resulting in poor generalization to unknown attack types across different scenarios and limited interpretability. To address these challenges, this paper presents a reinforcement fine-tuning-based face anti-spoofing method that stimulates the capabilities of multimodal large language models to think and learn how to solve the anti-spoofing task itself, rather than relying on the memorization of authenticity patterns. We design verifiable class consistent reward and reasoning consistent reward, and employ a GRPO-based optimization strategy to guide the model in exploring reasoning policies from multiple perspectives to maximize expected rewards. As a result, through iterative trial-and-error learning while retaining only high-reward trajectories, the model distills highly generalizable decision-making rules from the extensive solution space to effectively address cross-domain face anti-spoofing tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art cross-domain generalization performance. It generalizes well to diverse unknown attack types in unseen target domains while providing interpretable reasoning for its authenticity decisions without requiring labor-intensive textual annotations for training.

Xinyang Song, Libin Wang, Weining Wang et al.

The remarkable success of diffusion models in text-to-image generation has sparked growing interest in expanding their capabilities to a variety of multi-modal tasks, including image understanding, manipulation, and perception. These tasks require advanced semantic comprehension across both visual and textual modalities, especially in scenarios involving complex semantic instructions. However, existing approaches often rely heavily on vision-language models (VLMs) or modular designs for semantic guidance, leading to fragmented architectures and computational inefficiency. To address these challenges, we propose UniAlignment, a unified multimodal generation framework within a single diffusion transformer. UniAlignment introduces a dual-stream diffusion training strategy that incorporates both intrinsic-modal semantic alignment and cross-modal semantic alignment, thereby enhancing the model's cross-modal consistency and instruction-following robustness. Additionally, we present SemGen-Bench, a new benchmark specifically designed to evaluate multimodal semantic consistency under complex textual instructions. Extensive experiments across multiple tasks and benchmarks demonstrate that UniAlignment outperforms existing baselines, underscoring the significant potential of diffusion models in unified multimodal generation.

Fangling Jiang, Qi Li, Weining Wang et al.

Face anti-spoofing is a critical technology for ensuring the security of face recognition systems. However, its ability to generalize across diverse scenarios remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we attribute the limited generalization ability to two key factors: covariate shift, which arises from external data collection variations, and semantic shift, which results from substantial differences in emerging attack types. To address both challenges, we propose a novel approach for learning unknown spoof prompts, relying solely on real face images from a single source domain. Our method generates textual prompts for real faces and potential unknown spoof attacks by leveraging the general knowledge embedded in vision-language models, thereby enhancing the model's ability to generalize to unseen target domains. Specifically, we introduce a diverse spoof prompt optimization framework to learn effective prompts. This framework constrains unknown spoof prompts within a relaxed prior knowledge space while maximizing their distance from real face images. Moreover, it enforces semantic independence among different spoof prompts to capture a broad range of spoof patterns. Experimental results on nine datasets demonstrate that the learned prompts effectively transfer the knowledge of vision-language models, enabling state-of-the-art generalization ability against diverse unknown attack types across unseen target domains without using any spoof face images.

Fangling Jiang, Qi Li, Bing Liu et al.

3D mask presentation attack detection is crucial for protecting face recognition systems against the rising threat of 3D mask attacks. While most existing methods utilize multimodal features or remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) signals to distinguish between real faces and 3D masks, they face significant challenges, such as the high costs associated with multimodal sensors and limited generalization ability. Detection-related text descriptions offer concise, universal information and are cost-effective to obtain. However, the potential of vision-language multimodal features for 3D mask presentation attack detection remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-based prompt learning framework to explore the strong generalization capability of vision-language models for 3D mask presentation attack detection. Specifically, our approach incorporates entities and triples from knowledge graphs into the prompt learning process, generating fine-grained, task-specific explicit prompts that effectively harness the knowledge embedded in pre-trained vision-language models. Furthermore, considering different input images may emphasize distinct knowledge graph elements, we introduce a visual-specific knowledge filter based on an attention mechanism to refine relevant elements according to the visual context. Additionally, we leverage causal graph theory insights into the prompt learning process to further enhance the generalization ability of our method. During training, a spurious correlation elimination paradigm is employed, which removes category-irrelevant local image patches using guidance from knowledge-based text features, fostering the learning of generalized causal prompts that align with category-relevant local patches. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art intra- and cross-scenario detection performance on benchmark datasets.

Xingjian He, Weining Wang, Zhiyong Xu et al.

Compared with image scene parsing, video scene parsing introduces temporal information, which can effectively improve the consistency and accuracy of prediction. In this paper, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Semantic Consistency method to capture class-exclusive context information. Specifically, we design a spatial-temporal consistency loss to constrain the semantic consistency in spatial and temporal dimensions. In addition, we adopt an pseudo-labeling strategy to enrich the training dataset. We obtain the scores of 59.84% and 58.85% mIoU on development (test part 1) and testing set of VSPW, respectively. And our method wins the 1st place on VSPW challenge at ICCV2021.

Jing Liu, Xinxin Zhu, Fei Liu et al.

In this paper, we propose an Omni-perception Pre-Trainer (OPT) for cross-modal understanding and generation, by jointly modeling visual, text and audio resources. OPT is constructed in an encoder-decoder framework, including three single-modal encoders to generate token-based embeddings for each modality, a cross-modal encoder to encode the correlations among the three modalities, and two cross-modal decoders to generate text and image respectively. For the OPT's pre-training, we design a multi-task pretext learning scheme to model multi-modal resources from three different data granularities, \ie, token-, modality-, and sample-level modeling, through which OPT learns to align and translate among different modalities. The pre-training task is carried out on a large amount of image-text-audio triplets from Open Images. Experimental results show that OPT can learn strong image-text-audio multi-modal representations and achieve promising results on a variety of cross-modal understanding and generation tasks.

Xingqun Qi, Muyi Sun, Weining Wang et al.

Face sketch synthesis has made significant progress with the development of deep neural networks in these years. The delicate depiction of sketch portraits facilitates a wide range of applications like digital entertainment and law enforcement. However, accurate and realistic face sketch generation is still a challenging task due to the illumination variations and complex backgrounds in the real scenes. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel Semantic-Driven Generative Adversarial Network (SDGAN) which embeds global structure-level style injection and local class-level knowledge re-weighting. Specifically, we conduct facial saliency detection on the input face photos to provide overall facial texture structure, which could be used as a global type of prior information. In addition, we exploit face parsing layouts as the semantic-level spatial prior to enforce globally structural style injection in the generator of SDGAN. Furthermore, to enhance the realistic effect of the details, we propose a novel Adaptive Re-weighting Loss (ARLoss) which dedicates to balance the contributions of different semantic classes. Experimentally, our extensive experiments on CUFS and CUFSF datasets show that our proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Hao Wang, Weining Wang, Jing Liu

Video semantic segmentation requires to utilize the complex temporal relations between frames of the video sequence. Previous works usually exploit accurate optical flow to leverage the temporal relations, which suffer much from heavy computational cost. In this paper, we propose a Temporal Memory Attention Network (TMANet) to adaptively integrate the long-range temporal relations over the video sequence based on the self-attention mechanism without exhaustive optical flow prediction. Specially, we construct a memory using several past frames to store the temporal information of the current frame. We then propose a temporal memory attention module to capture the relation between the current frame and the memory to enhance the representation of the current frame. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performances on two challenging video semantic segmentation datasets, particularly 80.3% mIoU on Cityscapes and 76.5% mIoU on CamVid with ResNet-50.

Xinxin Zhu, Weining Wang, Longteng Guo et al.

Image captioning transforms complex visual information into abstract natural language for representation, which can help computers understanding the world quickly. However, due to the complexity of the real environment, it needs to identify key objects and realize their connections, and further generate natural language. The whole process involves a visual understanding module and a language generation module, which brings more challenges to the design of deep neural networks than other tasks. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has shown its important role in a variety of image recognition tasks. Besides, RNN plays an essential role in the image captioning task. We introduce a AutoCaption method to better design the decoder module of the image captioning where we use the NAS to design the decoder module called AutoRNN automatically. We use the reinforcement learning method based on shared parameters for automatic design the AutoRNN efficiently. The search space of the AutoCaption includes connections between the layers and the operations in layers both, and it can make AutoRNN express more architectures. In particular, RNN is equivalent to a subset of our search space. Experiments on the MSCOCO datasets show that our AutoCaption model can achieve better performance than traditional hand-design methods.