Compositional Generalization in Image Captioning

Mitja Nikolaus, Mostafa Abdou, Matthew Lamm, Rahul Aralikatte, Desmond Elliott

    4 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Image captioning models are usually evaluated on their ability to describe a held-out set of images, not on their ability to generalize to unseen concepts. We study the problem of compositional generalization, which measures how well a model composes unseen combinations of concepts when describing images. State-of-the-art image captioning models show poor generalization performance on this task. We propose a multi-task model to address the poor performance, that combines caption generation and image--sentence ranking, and uses a decoding mechanism that re-ranks the captions according their similarity to the image. This model is substantially better at generalizing to unseen combinations of concepts compared to state-of-the-art captioning models.
    Original languageUndefined/Unknown
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
    Number of pages12
    Place of PublicationHong Kong, China
    PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
    Publication date1 Nov 2019
    Pages87-98
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2019

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