Guided Open Vocabulary Image Captioning with Constrained Beam Search

Peter Anderson, Basura Fernando, Mark Johnson, Stephen Gould


Abstract
Existing image captioning models do not generalize well to out-of-domain images containing novel scenes or objects. This limitation severely hinders the use of these models in real world applications dealing with images in the wild. We address this problem using a flexible approach that enables existing deep captioning architectures to take advantage of image taggers at test time, without re-training. Our method uses constrained beam search to force the inclusion of selected tag words in the output, and fixed, pretrained word embeddings to facilitate vocabulary expansion to previously unseen tag words. Using this approach we achieve state of the art results for out-of-domain captioning on MSCOCO (and improved results for in-domain captioning). Perhaps surprisingly, our results significantly outperform approaches that incorporate the same tag predictions into the learning algorithm. We also show that we can significantly improve the quality of generated ImageNet captions by leveraging ground-truth labels.
Anthology ID:
D17-1098
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
936–945
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1098
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1098
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Peter Anderson, Basura Fernando, Mark Johnson, and Stephen Gould. 2017. Guided Open Vocabulary Image Captioning with Constrained Beam Search. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 936–945, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Guided Open Vocabulary Image Captioning with Constrained Beam Search (Anderson et al., EMNLP 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/D17-1098.pdf
Attachment:
 D17-1098.Attachment.zip
Data
Flickr30kMS COCO