In this paper, we introduce a new task - interactive image editing via conversational language, where users can guide an agent to edit images via multi-turn natural language dialogue. In each dialogue turn, the agent takes a source image and a natural language description from the user as the input and generates a new image following the textual description. Two new datasets are introduced for this task, Zap-Seq, and DeepFashion-Seq. We propose a novel Sequential Attention Generative Adversarial Network (SeqAttnGAN) framework, which applies a neural state tracker to encode both the source image and the textual description in each dialogue turn and generates high-quality new image consistent with both the preceding images and the dialogue context. To achieve better region-specific text-to-image generation, we also introduce an attention mechanism into the model. Experiments on the two new datasets show that the proposed SeqAttnGAN model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on the dialogue-based image editing task. Detailed quantitative evaluation and user study also demonstrate that our model is more effective than SOTA baselines on image generation, in terms of both visual quality and text-to-image consistency.
Most approaches have focused on end-to-end neural models based on the encoder-decoder architectures and sequence-to-sequence learning @cite_36 @cite_1 @cite_12 @cite_13 . Das @cite_16 proposed the task of visual dialogue, where the agent can answer questions about images in an interactive dialogue. De Vries @cite_15 introduced the GuessWhat?! game, where a series of questions is asked to pinpoint a speciﬁc object in an image, with yes no NA answers. However, these dialogue settings are purely text-based, where visual feature only plays a supportive role. DeVault @cite_34 investigated building dialogue systems that can help users efficiently explore data through visualizations. Guo @cite_35 introduced an agent presenting candidate images to the user and retrieving new images based on user's feedback. Another piece of related work is @cite_25 for interactive image generation by encoding history information. Different from them, text information is used to guide the image generation editing in our work.
@cite_35 @cite_36 @cite_1 @cite_34 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_12
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Attention-based neural encoder-decoder frameworks have been widely adopted for image captioning. Most methods force visual attention to be active for every generated word. However, the decoder likely requires little to no visual information from the image to predict non-visual words such as "the" and "of". Other words that may seem visual can often be predicted reliably just from the language model e.g., "sign" after "behind a red stop" or "phone" following "talking on a cell". In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive attention model with a visual sentinel. At each time step, our model decides whether to attend to the image (and if so, to which regions) or to the visual sentinel. The model decides whether to attend to the image and where, in order to extract meaningful information for sequential word generation. We test our method on the COCO image captioning 2015 challenge dataset and Flickr30K. Our approach sets the new state-of-the-art by a significant margin. Attention-based neural encoder-decoder frameworks have been widely adopted for image captioning. Most methods force visual attention to be active for every generated word. However, the decoder likely requires little to no visual information from the image to predict non-visual words such as the and of. Other words that may seem visual can often be predicted reliably just from the language model e.g., sign after behind a red stop or phone following talking on a cell. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive attention model with a visual sentinel. At each time step, our model decides whether to attend to the image (and if so, to which regions) or to the visual sentinel. The model decides whether to attend to the image and where, in order to extract meaningful information for sequential word generation. We test our method on the COCO image captioning 2015 challenge dataset and Flickr30K. Our approach sets the new state-of-the-art by a significant margin. The encoder-decoder framework has achieved promising progress for many sequence generation tasks, including machine translation, text summarization, dialog system, image captioning, etc. Such a framework adopts an one-pass forward process while decoding and generating a sequence, but lacks the deliberation process: A generated sequence is directly used as final output without further polishing. However, deliberation is a common behavior in human's daily life like reading news and writing papers articles books. In this work, we introduce the deliberation process into the encoder-decoder framework and propose deliberation networks for sequence generation. A deliberation network has two levels of decoders, where the first-pass decoder generates a raw sequence and the second-pass decoder polishes and refines the raw sentence with deliberation. Since the second-pass deliberation decoder has global information about what the sequence to be generated might be, it has the potential to generate a better sequence by looking into future words in the raw sentence. Experiments on neural machine translation and text summarization demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed deliberation networks. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.5. 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.