Image Captioning with Very Scarce Supervised Data: Adversarial Semi-Supervised Learning Approach

Dong-Jin Kim, Jinsoo Choi, Tae-Hyun Oh, In So Kweon


Abstract
Constructing an organized dataset comprised of a large number of images and several captions for each image is a laborious task, which requires vast human effort. On the other hand, collecting a large number of images and sentences separately may be immensely easier. In this paper, we develop a novel data-efficient semi-supervised framework for training an image captioning model. We leverage massive unpaired image and caption data by learning to associate them. To this end, our proposed semi-supervised learning method assigns pseudo-labels to unpaired samples via Generative Adversarial Networks to learn the joint distribution of image and caption. To evaluate, we construct scarcely-paired COCO dataset, a modified version of MS COCO caption dataset. The empirical results show the effectiveness of our method compared to several strong baselines, especially when the amount of the paired samples are scarce.
Anthology ID:
D19-1208
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2012–2023
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1208
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1208
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dong-Jin Kim, Jinsoo Choi, Tae-Hyun Oh, and In So Kweon. 2019. Image Captioning with Very Scarce Supervised Data: Adversarial Semi-Supervised Learning Approach. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2012–2023, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Image Captioning with Very Scarce Supervised Data: Adversarial Semi-Supervised Learning Approach (Kim et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1208.pdf
Data
MS COCO