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Comprehending and Ordering Semantics for Image Captioning (2206.06930v1)

Published 14 Jun 2022 in cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, and cs.MM

Abstract: Comprehending the rich semantics in an image and ordering them in linguistic order are essential to compose a visually-grounded and linguistically coherent description for image captioning. Modern techniques commonly capitalize on a pre-trained object detector/classifier to mine the semantics in an image, while leaving the inherent linguistic ordering of semantics under-exploited. In this paper, we propose a new recipe of Transformer-style structure, namely Comprehending and Ordering Semantics Networks (COS-Net), that novelly unifies an enriched semantic comprehending and a learnable semantic ordering processes into a single architecture. Technically, we initially utilize a cross-modal retrieval model to search the relevant sentences of each image, and all words in the searched sentences are taken as primary semantic cues. Next, a novel semantic comprehender is devised to filter out the irrelevant semantic words in primary semantic cues, and meanwhile infer the missing relevant semantic words visually grounded in the image. After that, we feed all the screened and enriched semantic words into a semantic ranker, which learns to allocate all semantic words in linguistic order as humans. Such sequence of ordered semantic words are further integrated with visual tokens of images to trigger sentence generation. Empirical evidences show that COS-Net clearly surpasses the state-of-the-art approaches on COCO and achieves to-date the best CIDEr score of 141.1% on Karpathy test split. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/YehLi/xmodaler/tree/master/configs/image_caption/cosnet}.

Citations (78)

Summary

  • The paper introduces COS-Net, which integrates semantic comprehension and ordering to enhance image captioning.
  • It employs a Transformer-based encoder-decoder and CLIP-driven retrieval to extract rich semantic cues from visual content.
  • Empirical results demonstrate superior CIDEr scores and reduced object hallucination on the COCO dataset, emphasizing improved caption coherence.

Overview of "Comprehending and Ordering Semantics for Image Captioning"

The paper "Comprehending and Ordering Semantics for Image Captioning" presents an innovative approach to improve the task of image captioning by effectively integrating semantic comprehension and ordering. The authors introduce a new architecture named Comprehending and Ordering Semantics Networks (COS-Net), which is designed to enhance image captioning by addressing key challenges in semantics extraction and linguistic coherence.

Approach and Methodology

The proposed COS-Net is built upon a Transformer-based encoder-decoder structure and emphasizes two critical aspects: comprehending rich semantics and ordering them linguistically. It leverages a cross-modal retrieval model, specifically CLIP, to derive primary semantic cues from semantically similar sentences in a dataset. This utilization of CLIP allows COS-Net to access broader semantic information beyond pre-defined class labels typically used by conventional object detectors.

An integral component of COS-Net is the semantic comprehender. This module refines the primary semantic cues by filtering out irrelevant semantics while inferring any missing but relevant semantics grounded in the visual content. This process ensures a more comprehensive and accurate semantic understanding of the image.

Further enhancing the linguistic coherence, the COS-Net introduces a semantic ranker. This component is designed to arrange the semantics in a human-like linguistic order by estimating the linguistic position of each semantic word. This ordered sequence acts as a structured guide for subsequent sentence generation.

Empirical Results

COS-Net demonstrates substantial improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods on the COCO dataset, clearly outperforming them in typical image captioning benchmarks such as CIDEr, achieving a score of 141.1% on the Karpathy test split. This performance highlights COS-Net’s ability to generate more visually-grounded and contextually coherent captions.

Additionally, COS-Net exhibits reduced object hallucination compared to other advanced techniques. This reduction implies a more accurate representation of the image content in the generated captions, as demonstrated via lower CHAIR scores on the robust split.

Implications and Future Directions

The implications of COS-Net are twofold, both practical and theoretical. Practically, this architecture can be deployed in applications necessitating accurate and coherent image descriptions, such as in assistive technologies for the visually impaired or content annotation. Theoretically, it provides a framework for integrating cross-modal retrieval with deep learning to enhance semantic understanding.

Looking forward, COS-Net opens several avenues for future research. One potential direction could involve extending this framework with larger, more diverse datasets to further enhance the generalizability and robustness of the model. Additionally, integrating real-time processing capabilities would increase COS-Net’s application in dynamic environments, such as autonomous driving or real-time video analysis.

In conclusion, the work presented in this paper signifies an advancement in image captioning by combining semantic comprehension with linguistic ordering within a unified architecture, offering promising results and insights for both current applications and future explorations in AI.