Language-Driven Region Pointer Advancement for Controllable Image Captioning

Annika Lindh, Robert Ross, John Kelleher


Abstract
Controllable Image Captioning is a recent sub-field in the multi-modal task of Image Captioning wherein constraints are placed on which regions in an image should be described in the generated natural language caption. This puts a stronger focus on producing more detailed descriptions, and opens the door for more end-user control over results. A vital component of the Controllable Image Captioning architecture is the mechanism that decides the timing of attending to each region through the advancement of a region pointer. In this paper, we propose a novel method for predicting the timing of region pointer advancement by treating the advancement step as a natural part of the language structure via a NEXT-token, motivated by a strong correlation to the sentence structure in the training data. We find that our timing agrees with the ground-truth timing in the Flickr30k Entities test data with a precision of 86.55% and a recall of 97.92%. Our model implementing this technique improves the state-of-the-art on standard captioning metrics while additionally demonstrating a considerably larger effective vocabulary size.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.174
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1922–1935
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.174
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.174
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Annika Lindh, Robert Ross, and John Kelleher. 2020. Language-Driven Region Pointer Advancement for Controllable Image Captioning. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1922–1935, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Language-Driven Region Pointer Advancement for Controllable Image Captioning (Lindh et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.174.pdf
Code
 AnnikaLindh/Controllable_Region_Pointer_Advancement
Data
Flickr30K EntitiesFlickr30k