Dense video captioning is a newly emerging task that aims at both localizing and describing all events in a video. We identify and tackle two challenges on this task, namely, (1) how to utilize both past and future contexts for accurate event proposal predictions, and (2) how to construct informative input to the decoder for generating natural event descriptions. First, previous works predominantly generate temporal event proposals in the forward direction, which neglects future video context. We propose a bidirectional proposal method that effectively exploits both past and future contexts to make proposal predictions. Second, different events ending at (nearly) the same time are indistinguishable in the previous works, resulting in the same captions. We solve this problem by representing each event with an attentive fusion of hidden states from the proposal module and video contents (e.g., C3D features). We further propose a novel context gating mechanism to balance the contributions from the current event and its surrounding contexts dynamically. We empirically show that our attentively fused event representation is superior to the proposal hidden states or video contents alone. By coupling proposal and captioning modules into one unified framework, our model outperforms the state-of-the-arts on the ActivityNet Captions dataset with a relative gain of over 100 (Meteor score increases from 4.82 to 9.65).
While aforementioned captioning methods generate only one sentence for an input video, video paragraph generation focuses on producing multiple semantics-fluent sentences. Rohrbach adapted statistical machine translation (SMT) @cite_16 to generate semantic consistent sentences with desired level of details @cite_5 . Yu proposed a hierarchical RNN to model both cross-sentence dependency and word dependency @cite_26 .
@cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_26
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We present an approach that exploits hierarchical Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to tackle the video captioning problem, i.e., generating one or multiple sentences to describe a realistic video. Our hierarchical framework contains a sentence generator and a paragraph generator. The sentence generator produces one simple short sentence that describes a specific short video interval. It exploits both temporal- and spatial-attention mechanisms to selectively focus on visual elements during generation. The paragraph generator captures the inter-sentence dependency by taking as input the sentential embedding produced by the sentence generator, combining it with the paragraph history, and outputting the new initial state for the sentence generator. We evaluate our approach on two large-scale benchmark datasets: YouTubeClips and TACoS-MultiLevel. The experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods with BLEU@4 scores 0.499 and 0.305 respectively. We present an approach that exploits hierarchical Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to tackle the video captioning problem, i.e., generating one or multiple sentences to describe a realistic video. Our hierarchical framework contains a sentence generator and a paragraph generator. The sentence generator produces one simple short sentence that describes a specific short video interval. It exploits both temporal-and spatial-attention mechanisms to selectively focus on visual elements during generation. The paragraph generator captures the inter-sentence dependency by taking as input the sentential embedding produced by the sentence generator, combining it with the paragraph history, and outputting the new initial state for the sentence generator. We evaluate our approach on two large-scale benchmark datasets: YouTubeClips and TACoS-MultiLevel. The experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods with BLEU@4 scores 0.499 and 0.305 respectively. Image captioning, which aims to automatically generate a sentence description for an image, has attracted much research attention in cognitive computing. The task is rather challenging, since it requires cognitively combining the techniques from both computer vision and natural language processing domains. Existing CNN-RNN framework-based methods suffer from two main problems: in the training phase, all the words of captions are treated equally without considering the importance of different words; in the caption generation phase, the semantic objects or scenes might be misrecognized. In our paper, we propose a method based on the encoder-decoder framework, named Reference based Long Short Term Memory (R-LSTM), aiming to lead the model to generate a more descriptive sentence for the given image by introducing reference information. Specifically, we assign different weights to the words according to the correlation between words and images during the training phase. We additionally maximize the consensus score between the captions generated by the captioning model and the reference information from the neighboring images of the target image, which can reduce the misrecognition problem. We have conducted extensive experiments and comparisons on the benchmark datasets MS COCO and Flickr30k. The results show that the proposed approach can outperform the state-of-the-art approaches on all metrics, especially achieving a 10.37 improvement in terms of CIDEr on MS COCO. By analyzing the quality of the generated captions, we come to a conclusion that through the introduction of reference information, our model can learn the key information of images and generate more trivial and relevant words for images. Automatically generating natural language descriptions of videos plays a fundamental challenge for computer vision community. Most recent progress in this problem has been achieved through employing 2-D and or 3-D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to encode video content and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to decode a sentence. In this paper, we present Long Short-Term Memory with Transferred Semantic Attributes (LSTM-TSA)&#x2014;a novel deep architecture that incorporates the transferred semantic attributes learnt from images and videos into the CNN plus RNN framework, by training them in an end-to-end manner. The design of LSTM-TSA is highly inspired by the facts that 1) semantic attributes play a significant contribution to captioning, and 2) images and videos carry complementary semantics and thus can reinforce each other for captioning. To boost video captioning, we propose a novel transfer unit to model the mutually correlated attributes learnt from images and videos. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public datasets, i.e., MSVD, M-VAD and MPII-MD. Our proposed LSTM-TSA achieves to-date the best published performance in sentence generation on MSVD: 52.8 and 74.0 in terms of BLEU@4 and CIDEr-D. Superior results are also reported on M-VAD and MPII-MD when compared to state-of-the-art methods. Automatically generating natural language descriptions of videos plays a fundamental challenge for computer vision community. Most recent progress in this problem has been achieved through employing 2-D and or 3-D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to encode video content and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to decode a sentence. In this paper, we present Long Short-Term Memory with Transferred Semantic Attributes (LSTM-TSA)---a novel deep architecture that incorporates the transferred semantic attributes learnt from images and videos into the CNN plus RNN framework, by training them in an end-to-end manner. The design of LSTM-TSA is highly inspired by the facts that 1) semantic attributes play a significant contribution to captioning, and 2) images and videos carry complementary semantics and thus can reinforce each other for captioning. To boost video captioning, we propose a novel transfer unit to model the mutually correlated attributes learnt from images and videos. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public datasets, i.e., MSVD, M-VAD and MPII-MD. Our proposed LSTM-TSA achieves to-date the best published performance in sentence generation on MSVD: 52.8 and 74.0 in terms of BLEU@4 and CIDEr-D. Superior results when compared to state-of-the-art methods are also reported on M-VAD and MPII-MD. Automatic generation of video caption is a challenging task as video is an information-intensive media with complex variations. Most existing methods, either based on language templates or sequence learning, have treated video as a flat data sequence while ignoring intrinsic multimodality nature. Observing that different modalities (e.g., frame, motion, and audio streams), as well as the elements within each modality, contribute differently to the sentence generation, we present a novel deep framework to boost video captioning by learning Multimodal Attention Long-Short Term Memory networks (MA-LSTM). Our proposed MA-LSTM fully exploits both multimodal streams and temporal attention to selectively focus on specific elements during the sentence generation. Moreover, we design a novel child-sum fusion unit in the MA-LSTM to effectively combine different encoded modalities to the initial decoding states. Different from existing approaches that employ the same LSTM structure for different modalities, we train modality-specific LSTM to capture the intrinsic representations of individual modalities. The experiments on two benchmark datasets (MSVD and MSR-VTT) show that our MA-LSTM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with 52.3 BLEU@4 and 70.4 CIDER-D metrics on MSVD dataset, respectively. Recently, video captioning has been attracting an increasing amount of interest, due to its potential for improving accessibility and information retrieval. While existing methods rely on different kinds of visual features and model structures, they do not fully exploit relevant semantic information. We present an extensible approach to jointly leverage several sorts of visual features and semantic attributes. Our novel architecture builds on LSTMs for sentence generation, with several attention layers and two multimodal layers. The attention mechanism learns to automatically select the most salient visual features or semantic attributes, and the multimodal layer yields overall representations for the input and outputs of the sentence generation component. Experimental results on the challenging MSVD and MSR-VTT datasets show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, while ground truth based semantic attributes are able to further elevate the output quality to a near-human level. This paper focuses on a novel and challenging vision task, dense video captioning, which aims to automatically describe a video clip with multiple informative and diverse caption sentences. The proposed method is trained without explicit annotation of fine-grained sentence to video region-sequence correspondence, but is only based on weak video-level sentence annotations. It differs from existing video captioning systems in three technical aspects. First, we propose lexical fully convolutional neural networks (Lexical-FCN) with weakly supervised multi-instance multi-label learning to weakly link video regions with lexical labels. Second, we introduce a novel submodular maximization scheme to generate multiple informative and diverse region-sequences based on the Lexical-FCN outputs. A winner-takes-all scheme is adopted to weakly associate sentences to region-sequences in the training phase. Third, a sequence-to-sequence learning based language model is trained with the weakly supervised information obtained through the association process. We show that the proposed method can not only produce informative and diverse dense captions, but also outperform state-of-the-art single video captioning methods by a large margin. This paper focuses on a novel and challenging vision task, dense video captioning, which aims to automatically describe a video clip with multiple informative and diverse caption sentences. The proposed method is trained without explicit annotation of fine-grained sentence to video region-sequence correspondence, but is only based on weak video-level sentence annotations. It differs from existing video captioning systems in three technical aspects. First, we propose lexical fully convolutional neural networks (Lexical-FCN) with weakly supervised multi-instance multi-label learning to weakly link video regions with lexical labels. Second, we introduce a novel submodular maximization scheme to generate multiple informative and diverse region-sequences based on the Lexical-FCN outputs. A winner-takes-all scheme is adopted to weakly associate sentences to region-sequences in the training phase. Third, a sequence-to-sequence learning based language model is trained with the weakly supervised information obtained through the association process. We show that the proposed method can not only produce informative and diverse dense captions, but also outperform state-of-the-art single video captioning methods by a large margin. Two recent approaches have achieved state-of-the-art results in image captioning. The first uses a pipelined process where a set of candidate words is generated by a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on images, and then a maximum entropy (ME) language model is used to arrange these words into a coherent sentence. The second uses the penultimate activation layer of the CNN as input to a recurrent neural network (RNN) that then generates the caption sequence. In this paper, we compare the merits of these different language modeling approaches for the first time by using the same state-of-the-art CNN as input. We examine issues in the different approaches, including linguistic irregularities, caption repetition, and data set overlap. By combining key aspects of the ME and RNN methods, we achieve a new record performance over previously published results on the benchmark COCO dataset. However, the gains we see in BLEU do not translate to human judgments. Automatically describing video content with natural language is a fundamental challenge of multimedia. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), which models sequence dynamics, has attracted increasing attention on visual interpretation. However, most existing approaches generate a word locally with given previous words and the visual content, while the relationship between sentence semantics and visual content is not holistically exploited. As a result, the generated sentences may be contextually correct but the semantics (e.g., subjects, verbs or objects) are not true. This paper presents a novel unified framework, named Long Short-Term Memory with visual-semantic Embedding (LSTM-E), which can simultaneously explore the learning of LSTM and visual-semantic embedding. The former aims to locally maximize the probability of generating the next word given previous words and visual content, while the latter is to create a visual-semantic embedding space for enforcing the relationship between the semantics of the entire sentence and visual content. Our proposed LSTM-E consists of three components: a 2-D and or 3-D deep convolutional neural networks for learning powerful video representation, a deep RNN for generating sentences, and a joint embedding model for exploring the relationships between visual content and sentence semantics. The experiments on YouTube2Text dataset show that our proposed LSTM-E achieves to-date the best reported performance in generating natural sentences: 45.3 and 31.0 in terms of BLEU@4 and METEOR, respectively. We also demonstrate that LSTM-E is superior in predicting Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets to several state-of-the-art techniques. Video captioning which automatically translates video clips into natural language sentences is a very important task in computer vision. By virtue of recent deep learning technologies, video captioning has made great progress. However, learning an effective mapping from the visual sequence space to the language space is still a challenging problem due to the long-term multimodal dependency modelling and semantic misalignment. Inspired by the facts that memory modelling poses potential advantages to long-term sequential problems [35] and working memory is the key factor of visual attention [33], we propose a Multimodal Memory Model (M3) to describe videos, which builds a visual and textual shared memory to model the long-term visual-textual dependency and further guide visual attention on described visual targets to solve visual-textual alignments. Specifically, similar to [10], the proposed M3 attaches an external memory to store and retrieve both visual and textual contents by interacting with video and sentence with multiple read and write operations. To evaluate the proposed model, we perform experiments on two public datasets: MSVD and MSR-VTT. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms most of the state-of-the-art methods in terms of BLEU and METEOR. Corpus-based approaches to machine translation (MT) rely on the availability of parallel corpora. To produce user-acceptable translation outputs, such systems need high quality data to be efficiently trained, optimized and evaluated. However, building high quality dataset is a relatively expensive task. In this paper, we describe the data collection and analysis of a large database of 10.881 SMT translation output hypotheses manually corrected. These post-editions were collected using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, following some ethical guidelines. A complete analysis of the collected data pointed out a high quality of the corrections with more than 87 of the collected post-editions that improve hypotheses and more than 94 of the crowdsourced post-editions which are at least of professional quality. We also post-edited 1,500 gold-standard reference translations (of bilingual parallel corpora generated by professional) and noticed that 72 of these translations needed to be corrected during post-edition. We computed a proximity measure between the different kind of translations and pointed out that reference translations are as far from the hypotheses as from the corrected hypotheses (i.e. the post-editions). In light of these last findings, we discuss the adequation of text-based generated reference translations to train setence-to-sentence based SMT systems. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical recurrent neural network language model (HRNNLM) for document modeling. After establishing a RNN to capture the coherence between sentences in a document, HRNNLM integrates it as the sentence history information into the word level RNN to predict the word sequence with cross-sentence contextual information. A two-step training approach is designed, in which sentence-level and word-level language models are approximated for the convergence in a pipeline style. Examined by the standard sentence reordering scenario, HRNNLM is proved for its better accuracy in modeling the sentence coherence. And at the word level, experimental results also indicate a significant lower model perplexity, followed by a practical better translation result when applied to a Chinese-English document translation reranking task. Automatically describing video content with natural language is a fundamental challenge of computer vision. Re-current Neural Networks (RNNs), which models sequence dynamics, has attracted increasing attention on visual interpretation. However, most existing approaches generate a word locally with the given previous words and the visual content, while the relationship between sentence semantics and visual content is not holistically exploited. As a result, the generated sentences may be contextually correct but the semantics (e.g., subjects, verbs or objects) are not true. This paper presents a novel unified framework, named Long Short-Term Memory with visual-semantic Embedding (LSTM-E), which can simultaneously explore the learning of LSTM and visual-semantic embedding. The former aims to locally maximize the probability of generating the next word given previous words and visual content, while the latter is to create a visual-semantic embedding space for enforcing the relationship between the semantics of the entire sentence and visual content. The experiments on YouTube2Text dataset show that our proposed LSTM-E achieves to-date the best published performance in generating natural sentences: 45.3 and 31.0 in terms of BLEU@4 and METEOR, respectively. Superior performances are also reported on two movie description datasets (M-VAD and MPII-MD). In addition, we demonstrate that LSTM-E outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques in predicting Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. A natural image usually conveys rich semantic content and can be viewed from different angles. Existing image description methods are largely restricted by small sets of biased visual paragraph annotations, and fail to cover rich underlying semantics. In this paper, we investigate a semi-supervised paragraph generative framework that is able to synthesize diverse and semantically coherent paragraph descriptions by reasoning over local semantic regions and exploiting linguistic knowledge. The proposed Recurrent Topic-Transition Generative Adversarial Network (RTT-GAN) builds an adversarial framework between a structured paragraph generator and multi-level paragraph discriminators. The paragraph generator generates sentences recurrently by incorporating region-based visual and language attention mechanisms at each step. The quality of generated paragraph sentences is assessed by multi-level adversarial discriminators from two aspects, namely, plausibility at sentence level and topic-transition coherence at paragraph level. The joint adversarial training of RTT-GAN drives the model to generate realistic paragraphs with smooth logical transition between sentence topics. Extensive quantitative experiments on image and video paragraph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our RTT-GAN in both supervised and semi-supervised settings. Qualitative results on telling diverse stories for an image verify the interpretability of RTT-GAN. A natural image usually conveys rich semantic content and can be viewed from different angles. Existing image description methods are largely restricted by small sets of biased visual paragraph annotations, and fail to cover rich underlying semantics. In this paper, we investigate a semi-supervised paragraph generative framework that is able to synthesize diverse and semantically coherent paragraph descriptions by reasoning over local semantic regions and exploiting linguistic knowledge. The proposed Recurrent Topic-Transition Generative Adversarial Network (RTT-GAN) builds an adversarial framework between a structured paragraph generator and multi-level paragraph discriminators. The paragraph generator generates sentences recurrently by incorporating region-based visual and language attention mechanisms at each step. The quality of generated paragraph sentences is assessed by multi-level adversarial discriminators from two aspects, namely, plausibility at sentence level and topic-transition coherence at paragraph level. The joint adversarial training of RTT-GAN drives the model to generate realistic paragraphs with smooth logical transition between sentence topics. Extensive quantitative experiments on image and video paragraph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our RTT-GAN in both supervised and semi-supervised settings. Qualitative results on telling diverse stories for an image also verify the interpretability of RTT-GAN. Recent progress in using long short-term memory (LSTM) for image captioning has motivated the exploration of their applications for video captioning. By taking a video as a sequence of features, an LSTM model is trained on video-sentence pairs and learns to associate a video to a sentence. However, most existing methods compress an entire video shot or frame into a static representation, without considering attention mechanism which allows for selecting salient features. Furthermore, existing approaches usually model the translating error, but ignore the correlations between sentence semantics and visual content. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel end-to-end framework named aLSTMs, an attention-based LSTM model with semantic consistency, to transfer videos to natural sentences. This framework integrates attention mechanism with LSTM to capture salient structures of video, and explores the correlation between multimodal representations (i.e., words and visual content) for generating sentences with rich semantic content. Specifically, we first propose an attention mechanism that uses the dynamic weighted sum of local two-dimensional convolutional neural network representations. Then, an LSTM decoder takes these visual features at time @math and the word-embedding feature at time @math @math 1 to generate important words. Finally, we use multimodal embedding to map the visual and sentence features into a joint space to guarantee the semantic consistence of the sentence description and the video visual content. Experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method using single feature can achieve competitive or even better results than the state-of-the-art baselines for video captioning in both BLEU and METEOR. This paper proposes a method that leverages multiple machine translation (MT) engines for paraphrase generation (PG). The method includes two stages. Firstly, we use a multi-pivot approach to acquire a set of candidate paraphrases for a source sentence S. Then, we employ two kinds of techniques, namely the selection-based technique and the decoding-based technique, to produce a best paraphrase T for S using the candidates acquired in the first stage. Experimental results show that: (1) The multi-pivot approach is effective for obtaining plenty of valuable candidate paraphrases. (2) Both the selection-based and decoding-based techniques can make good use of the candidates and produce high-quality paraphrases. Moreover, these two techniques are complementary. (3) The proposed method outperforms a state-of-the-art paraphrase generation approach. A new model for video captioning is developed, using a deep three-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (C3D) as an encoder for videos and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) as a decoder for captions. We consider both "hard" and "soft" attention mechanisms, to adaptively and sequentially focus on different layers of features (levels of feature "abstraction"), as well as local spatiotemporal regions of the feature maps at each layer. The proposed approach is evaluated on three benchmark datasets: YouTube2Text, M-VAD and MSR-VTT. Along with visualizing the results and how the model works, these experiments quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive spatiotemporal feature abstraction for translating videos to sentences with rich semantics.