Recently, much advance has been made in image captioning, and an encoder-decoder framework has achieved outstanding performance for this task. In this paper, we propose an extension of the encoder-decoder framework by adding a component called guiding network. The guiding network models the attribute properties of input images, and its output is leveraged to compose the input of the decoder at each time step. The guiding network can be plugged into the current encoder-decoder framework and trained in an end-to-end manner. Hence, the guiding vector can be adaptively learned according to the signal from the decoder, making itself to embed information from both image and language. Additionally, discriminative supervision can be employed to further improve the quality of guidance. The advantages of our proposed approach are verified by experiments carried out on the MS COCO dataset.
We present a holistic data-driven approach to image description generation, exploiting the vast amount of (noisy) parallel image data and associated natural language descriptions available on the web. More specifically, given a query image, we retrieve existing human-composed phrases used to describe visually similar images, then selectively combine those phrases to generate a novel description for the query image. We cast the generation process as constraint optimization problems, collectively incorporating multiple interconnected aspects of language composition for content planning, surface realization and discourse structure. Evaluation by human annotators indicates that our final system generates more semantically correct and linguistically appealing descriptions than two nontrivial baselines. We present a nonparametric density estimation technique for image caption generation. Data-driven matching methods have shown to be effective for a variety of complex problems in Computer Vision. These methods reduce an inference problem for an unknown image to finding an existing labeled image which is semantically similar. However, related approaches for image caption generation (, 2011; , 2012) are hampered by noisy estimations of visual content and poor alignment between images and human-written captions. Our work addresses this challenge by estimating a word frequency representation of the visual content of a query image. This allows us to cast caption generation as an extractive summarization problem. Our model strongly outperforms two state-ofthe-art caption extraction systems according to human judgments of caption relevance.