Image captioning models have lately shown impressive results when applied to standard datasets. Switching to real-life scenarios, however, constitutes a challenge due to the larger variety of visual concepts which are not covered in existing training sets. For this reason, novel object captioning (NOC) has recently emerged as a paradigm to test captioning models on objects which are unseen during the training phase. In this paper, we present a novel approach for NOC that learns to select the most relevant objects of an image, regardless of their adherence to the training set, and to constrain the generative process of a language model accordingly. Our architecture is fully-attentive and end-to-end trainable, also when incorporating constraints. We perform experiments on the held-out COCO dataset, where we demonstrate improvements over the state of the art, both in terms of adaptability to novel objects and caption quality.
@article{arxiv.2106.01424,
title = {Learning to Select: A Fully Attentive Approach for Novel Object Captioning},
author = {Marco Cagrandi and Marcella Cornia and Matteo Stefanini and Lorenzo Baraldi and Rita Cucchiara},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.01424},
year = {2021}
}