Focusing on text-to-image (T2I) generation, we propose Text and Image Mutual-Translation Adversarial Networks (TIME), a lightweight but effective model that jointly learns a T2I generator G and an image captioning discriminator D under the Generative Adversarial Network framework. While previous methods tackle the T2I problem as a uni-directional task and use pre-trained language models to enforce the image--text consistency, TIME requires neither extra modules nor pre-training. We show that the performance of G can be boosted substantially by training it jointly with D as a language model. Specifically, we adopt Transformers to model the cross-modal connections between the image features and word embeddings, and design an annealing conditional hinge loss that dynamically balances the adversarial learning. In our experiments, TIME achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the CUB and MS-COCO dataset (Inception Score of 4.91 and Fr\'echet Inception Distance of 14.3 on CUB), and shows promising performance on MS-COCO on image captioning and downstream vision-language tasks.
@article{arxiv.2005.13192,
title = {TIME: Text and Image Mutual-Translation Adversarial Networks},
author = {Bingchen Liu and Kunpeng Song and Yizhe Zhu and Gerard de Melo and Ahmed Elgammal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.13192},
year = {2020}
}