Person re-identification is an important task that requires learning discriminative visual features for distinguishing different person identities. Diverse auxiliary information has been utilized to improve the visual feature learning. In this paper, we propose to exploit natural language description as additional training supervisions for effective visual features. Compared with other auxiliary information, language can describe a specific person from more compact and semantic visual aspects, thus is complementary to the pixel-level image data. Our method not only learns better global visual feature with the supervision of the overall description but also enforces semantic consistencies between local visual and linguistic features, which is achieved by building global and local image-language associations. The global image-language association is established according to the identity labels, while the local association is based upon the implicit correspondences between image regions and noun phrases. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of employing language as training supervisions with the two association schemes. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without utilizing any auxiliary information during testing and shows better performance than other joint embedding methods for the image-language association.
 Automatic synthesis of realistic images from text would be interesting and useful, but current AI systems are still far from this goal. However, in recent years generic and powerful recurrent neural network architectures have been developed to learn discriminative text feature representations. Meanwhile, deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (GANs) have begun to generate highly compelling images of specific categories, such as faces, album covers, and room interiors. In this work, we develop a novel deep architecture and GAN formulation to effectively bridge these advances in text and image model- ing, translating visual concepts from characters to pixels. We demonstrate the capability of our model to generate plausible images of birds and flowers from detailed text descriptions.  Modern visual recognition systems are often limited in their ability to scale to large numbers of object categories. This limitation is in part due to the increasing difficulty of acquiring sufficient training data in the form of labeled images as the number of object categories grows. One remedy is to leverage data from other sources - such as text data - both to train visual models and to constrain their predictions. In this paper we present a new deep visual-semantic embedding model trained to identify visual objects using both labeled image data as well as semantic information gleaned from unannotated text. We demonstrate that this model matches state-of-the-art performance on the 1000-class ImageNet object recognition challenge while making more semantically reasonable errors, and also show that the semantic information can be exploited to make predictions about tens of thousands of image labels not observed during training. Semantic knowledge improves such zero-shot predictions achieving hit rates of up to 18 across thousands of novel labels never seen by the visual model. Generative Adversarial Nets [8] were recently introduced as a novel way to train generative models. In this work we introduce the conditional version of generative adversarial nets, which can be constructed by simply feeding the data, y, we wish to condition on to both the generator and discriminator. We show that this model can generate MNIST digits conditioned on class labels. We also illustrate how this model could be used to learn a multi-modal model, and provide preliminary examples of an application to image tagging in which we demonstrate how this approach can generate descriptive tags which are not part of training labels.  Recently visual question answering (VQA) and visual question generation (VQG) are two trending topics in the computer vision, which have been explored separately. In this work, we propose an end-to-end unified framework, the Invertible Question Answering Network (iQAN), to leverage the complementary relations between questions and answers in images by jointly training the model on VQA and VQG tasks. Corresponding parameter sharing scheme and regular terms are proposed as constraints to explicitly leverage Q,A's dependencies to guide the training process. After training, iQAN can take either question or answer as input, then output the counterpart. Evaluated on the large-scale visual question answering datasets CLEVR and VQA2, our iQAN improves the VQA accuracy over the baselines. We also show the dual learning framework of iQAN can be generalized to other VQA architectures and consistently improve the results over both the VQA and VQG tasks. We present a model that generates natural language descriptions of images and their regions. Our approach leverages datasets of images and their sentence descriptions to learn about the inter-modal correspondences between language and visual data. Our alignment model is based on a novel combination of Convolutional Neural Networks over image regions, bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) over sentences, and a structured objective that aligns the two modalities through a multimodal embedding. We then describe a Multimodal Recurrent Neural Network architecture that uses the inferred alignments to learn to generate novel descriptions of image regions. We demonstrate that our alignment model produces state of the art results in retrieval experiments on Flickr8K, Flickr30K and MSCOCO datasets. We then show that the generated descriptions outperform retrieval baselines on both full images and on a new dataset of region-level annotations. Finally, we conduct large-scale analysis of our RNN language model on the Visual Genome dataset of 4.1 million captions and highlight the differences between image and region-level caption statistics.  We introduce a model for bidirectional retrieval of images and sentences through a multi-modal embedding of visual and natural language data. Unlike previous models that directly map images or sentences into a common embedding space, our model works on a finer level and embeds fragments of images (objects) and fragments of sentences (typed dependency tree relations) into a common space. In addition to a ranking objective seen in previous work, this allows us to add a new fragment alignment objective that learns to directly associate these fragments across modalities. Extensive experimental evaluation shows that reasoning on both the global level of images and sentences and the finer level of their respective fragments significantly improves performance on image-sentence retrieval tasks. Additionally, our model provides interpretable predictions since the inferred inter-modal fragment alignment is explicit.   We propose the task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer. Mirroring real-world scenarios, such as helping the visually impaired, both the questions and answers are open-ended. Visual questions selectively target different areas of an image, including background details and underlying context. As a result, a system that succeeds at VQA typically needs a more detailed understanding of the image and complex reasoning than a system producing generic image captions. Moreover, VQA is amenable to automatic evaluation, since many open-ended answers contain only a few words or a closed set of answers that can be provided in a multiple-choice format. We provide a dataset containing 0.25M images, 0.76M questions, and 10M answers (www.visualqa.org), and discuss the information it provides. Numerous baselines and methods for VQA are provided and compared with human performance. Our VQA demo is available on CloudCV (this http URL).   Automatically describing the content of an image is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence that connects computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we present a generative model based on a deep recurrent architecture that combines recent advances in computer vision and machine translation and that can be used to generate natural sentences describing an image. The model is trained to maximize the likelihood of the target description sentence given the training image. Experiments on several datasets show the accuracy of the model and the fluency of the language it learns solely from image descriptions. Our model is often quite accurate, which we verify both qualitatively and quantitatively. For instance, while the current state-of-the-art BLEU-1 score (the higher the better) on the Pascal dataset is 25, our approach yields 59, to be compared to human performance around 69. We also show BLEU-1 score improvements on Flickr30k, from 56 to 66, and on SBU, from 19 to 28. Lastly, on the newly released COCO dataset, we achieve a BLEU-4 of 27.7, which is the current state-of-the-art. The aim of image captioning is to generate captions by machine to describe image contents. Despite many efforts, generating discriminative captions for images remains non-trivial. Most traditional approaches imitate the language structure patterns, thus tend to fall into a stereotype of replicating frequent phrases or sentences and neglect unique aspects of each image. In this work, we propose an image captioning framework with a self-retrieval module as training guidance, which encourages generating discriminative captions. It brings unique advantages: (1) the self-retrieval guidance can act as a metric and an evaluator of caption discriminativeness to assure the quality of generated captions. (2) The correspondence between generated captions and images are naturally incorporated in the generation process without human annotations, and hence our approach could utilize a large amount of unlabeled images to boost captioning performance with no additional annotations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed retrieval-guided method on COCO and Flickr30k captioning datasets, and show its superior captioning performance with more discriminative captions. 