Self-supervised Cross-view Representation Reconstruction for Change Captioning
This work addresses the problem of generating accurate captions for image differences, which is important for applications like surveillance and robotics, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing change captioning methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of learning stable difference representations for change captioning by proposing a self-supervised cross-view representation reconstruction network, achieving state-of-the-art results on four datasets.
Change captioning aims to describe the difference between a pair of similar images. Its key challenge is how to learn a stable difference representation under pseudo changes caused by viewpoint change. In this paper, we address this by proposing a self-supervised cross-view representation reconstruction (SCORER) network. Concretely, we first design a multi-head token-wise matching to model relationships between cross-view features from similar/dissimilar images. Then, by maximizing cross-view contrastive alignment of two similar images, SCORER learns two view-invariant image representations in a self-supervised way. Based on these, we reconstruct the representations of unchanged objects by cross-attention, thus learning a stable difference representation for caption generation. Further, we devise a cross-modal backward reasoning to improve the quality of caption. This module reversely models a ``hallucination'' representation with the caption and ``before'' representation. By pushing it closer to the ``after'' representation, we enforce the caption to be informative about the difference in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments show our method achieves the state-of-the-art results on four datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/tuyunbin/SCORER.