Show, Recall, and Tell: Image Captioning with Recall Mechanism
This work addresses the problem of improving image captioning accuracy for applications in computer vision and natural language processing, representing an incremental advancement with specific gains.
The paper tackles the challenge of generating natural and accurate descriptions in image captioning by proposing a novel recall mechanism that imitates human captioning processes, achieving BLEU-4/CIDEr/SPICE scores of 38.7/129.1/22.4 on the MSCOCO Karpathy test split, surpassing other state-of-the-art methods.
Generating natural and accurate descriptions in image cap-tioning has always been a challenge. In this paper, we pro-pose a novel recall mechanism to imitate the way human con-duct captioning. There are three parts in our recall mecha-nism : recall unit, semantic guide (SG) and recalled-wordslot (RWS). Recall unit is a text-retrieval module designedto retrieve recalled words for images. SG and RWS are de-signed for the best use of recalled words. SG branch cangenerate a recalled context, which can guide the process ofgenerating caption. RWS branch is responsible for copyingrecalled words to the caption. Inspired by pointing mecha-nism in text summarization, we adopt a soft switch to balancethe generated-word probabilities between SG and RWS. Inthe CIDEr optimization step, we also introduce an individualrecalled-word reward (WR) to boost training. Our proposedmethods (SG+RWS+WR) achieve BLEU-4 / CIDEr / SPICEscores of 36.6 / 116.9 / 21.3 with cross-entropy loss and 38.7 /129.1 / 22.4 with CIDEr optimization on MSCOCO Karpathytest split, which surpass the results of other state-of-the-artmethods.