The explosion of video data on the internet requires effective and efficient technology to generate captions automatically for people who are not able to watch the videos. Despite the great progress of video captioning research, particularly on video feature encoding, the language decoder is still largely based on the prevailing RNN decoder such as LSTM, which tends to prefer the frequent word that aligns with the video. In this paper, we propose a boundary-aware hierarchical language decoder for video captioning, which consists of a high-level GRU based language decoder, working as a global (caption-level) language model, and a low-level GRU based language decoder, working as a local (phrase-level) language model. Most importantly, we introduce a binary gate into the low-level GRU language decoder to detect the language boundaries. Together with other advanced components including joint video prediction, shared soft attention, and boundary-aware video encoding, our integrated video captioning framework can discover hierarchical language information and distinguish the subject and the object in a sentence, which are usually confusing during the language generation. Extensive experiments on two widely-used video captioning datasets, MSR-Video-to-Text (MSR-VTT) \cite{xu2016msr} and YouTube-to-Text (MSVD) \cite{chen2011collecting} show that our method is highly competitive, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Video captioning is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of visual scenes. State-of-the-art methods generate captions using either scene-level or object-level information but without explicitly modeling object interactions. Thus, they often fail to make visually grounded predictions, and are sensitive to spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal graph model for video captioning that exploits object interactions in space and time. Our model builds interpretable links and is able to provide explicit visual grounding. To avoid unstable performance caused by the variable number of objects, we further propose an object-aware knowledge distillation mechanism, in which local object information is used to regularize global scene features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on two benchmarks, showing our approach yields competitive performance with interpretable predictions.
We propose UniViLM: a Unified Video and Language pre-training Model for multimodal understanding and generation. Motivated by the recent success of BERT based pre-training technique for NLP and image-language tasks, VideoBERT and CBT are proposed to exploit BERT model for video and language pre-training using narrated instructional videos. Different from their works which only pre-train understanding task, we propose a unified video-language pre-training model for both understanding and generation tasks. Our model comprises of 4 components including two single-modal encoders, a cross encoder and a decoder with the Transformer backbone. We first pre-train our model to learn the universal representation for both video and language on a large instructional video dataset. Then we fine-tune the model on two multimodal tasks including understanding task (text-based video retrieval) and generation task (multimodal video captioning). Our extensive experiments show that our method can improve the performance of both understanding and generation tasks and achieves the state-of-the art results.
It is well believed that video captioning is a fundamental but challenging task in both computer vision and artificial intelligence fields. The prevalent approach is to map an input video to a variable-length output sentence in a sequence to sequence manner via Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Nevertheless, the training of RNN still suffers to some degree from vanishing/exploding gradient problem, making the optimization difficult. Moreover, the inherently recurrent dependency in RNN prevents parallelization within a sequence during training and therefore limits the computations. In this paper, we present a novel design --- Temporal Deformable Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks (dubbed as TDConvED) that fully employ convolutions in both encoder and decoder networks for video captioning. Technically, we exploit convolutional block structures that compute intermediate states of a fixed number of inputs and stack several blocks to capture long-term relationships. The structure in encoder is further equipped with temporal deformable convolution to enable free-form deformation of temporal sampling. Our model also capitalizes on temporal attention mechanism for sentence generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on both MSVD and MSR-VTT video captioning datasets, and superior results are reported when comparing to conventional RNN-based encoder-decoder techniques. More remarkably, TDConvED increases CIDEr-D performance from 58.8% to 67.2% on MSVD.
Building correspondences across different modalities, such as video and language, has recently become critical in many visual recognition applications, such as video captioning. Inspired by machine translation, recent models tackle this task using an encoder-decoder strategy. The (video) encoder is traditionally a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), while the decoding (for language generation) is done using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Current state-of-the-art methods, however, train encoder and decoder separately. CNNs are pretrained on object and/or action recognition tasks and used to encode video-level features. The decoder is then optimised on such static features to generate the video's description. This disjoint setup is arguably sub-optimal for input (video) to output (description) mapping. In this work, we propose to optimise both encoder and decoder simultaneously in an end-to-end fashion. In a two-stage training setting, we first initialise our architecture using pre-trained encoders and decoders -- then, the entire network is trained end-to-end in a fine-tuning stage to learn the most relevant features for video caption generation. In our experiments, we use GoogLeNet and Inception-ResNet-v2 as encoders and an original Soft-Attention (SA-) LSTM as a decoder. Analogously to gains observed in other computer vision problems, we show that end-to-end training significantly improves over the traditional, disjoint training process. We evaluate our End-to-End (EtENet) Networks on the Microsoft Research Video Description (MSVD) and the MSR Video to Text (MSR-VTT) benchmark datasets, showing how EtENet achieves state-of-the-art performance across the board.
Automatic generation of video captions is a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Recent techniques typically employ a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recursive Neural Networks (RNNs) for video captioning. These methods mainly focus on tailoring sequence learning through RNNs for better caption generation, whereas off-the-shelf visual features are borrowed from CNNs. We argue that careful designing of visual features for this task is equally important, and present a visual feature encoding technique to generate semantically rich captions using Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). Our method embeds rich temporal dynamics in visual features by hierarchically applying Short Fourier Transform to CNN features of the whole video. It additionally derives high level semantics from an object detector to enrich the representation with spatial dynamics of the detected objects. The final representation is projected to a compact space and fed to a language model. By learning a relatively simple language model comprising two GRU layers, we establish new state-of-the-art on MSVD and MSR-VTT datasets for METEOR and ROUGE_L metrics.
The recent advances of deep learning in both computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) provide us a new way of understanding semantics, by which we can deal with more challenging tasks such as automatic description generation from natural images. In this challenge, the encoder-decoder framework has achieved promising performance when a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used as image encoder and a recurrent neural network (RNN) as decoder. In this paper, we introduce a sequential guiding network that guides the decoder during word generation. The new model is an extension of the encoder-decoder framework with attention that has an additional guiding long short-term memory (LSTM) and can be trained in an end-to-end manner by using image/descriptions pairs. We validate our approach by conducting extensive experiments on a benchmark dataset, i.e., MS COCO Captions. The proposed model achieves significant improvement comparing to the other state-of-the-art deep learning models.
Recent progress has been made in using attention based encoder-decoder framework for image and video captioning. Most existing decoders apply the attention mechanism to every generated word including both visual words (e.g., "gun" and "shooting") and non-visual words (e.g. "the", "a"). However, these non-visual words can be easily predicted using natural language model without considering visual signals or attention. Imposing attention mechanism on non-visual words could mislead and decrease the overall performance of visual captioning. Furthermore, the hierarchy of LSTMs enables more complex representation of visual data, capturing information at different scales. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical LSTM with adaptive attention (hLSTMat) approach for image and video captioning. Specifically, the proposed framework utilizes the spatial or temporal attention for selecting specific regions or frames to predict the related words, while the adaptive attention is for deciding whether to depend on the visual information or the language context information. Also, a hierarchical LSTMs is designed to simultaneously consider both low-level visual information and high-level language context information to support the caption generation. We initially design our hLSTMat for video captioning task. Then, we further refine it and apply it to image captioning task. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we test our method on both video and image captioning tasks. Experimental results show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance for most of the evaluation metrics on both tasks. The effect of important components is also well exploited in the ablation study.
In this paper, the problem of describing visual contents of a video sequence with natural language is addressed. Unlike previous video captioning work mainly exploiting the cues of video contents to make a language description, we propose a reconstruction network (RecNet) with a novel encoder-decoder-reconstructor architecture, which leverages both the forward (video to sentence) and backward (sentence to video) flows for video captioning. Specifically, the encoder-decoder makes use of the forward flow to produce the sentence description based on the encoded video semantic features. Two types of reconstructors are customized to employ the backward flow and reproduce the video features based on the hidden state sequence generated by the decoder. The generation loss yielded by the encoder-decoder and the reconstruction loss introduced by the reconstructor are jointly drawn into training the proposed RecNet in an end-to-end fashion. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed reconstructor can boost the encoder-decoder models and leads to significant gains in video caption accuracy.
Video captioning is the task of automatically generating a textual description of the actions in a video. Although previous work (e.g. sequence-to-sequence model) has shown promising results in abstracting a coarse description of a short video, it is still very challenging to caption a video containing multiple fine-grained actions with a detailed description. This paper aims to address the challenge by proposing a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for video captioning, where a high-level Manager module learns to design sub-goals and a low-level Worker module recognizes the primitive actions to fulfill the sub-goal. With this compositional framework to reinforce video captioning at different levels, our approach significantly outperforms all the baseline methods on a newly introduced large-scale dataset for fine-grained video captioning. Furthermore, our non-ensemble model has already achieved the state-of-the-art results on the widely-used MSR-VTT dataset.
Accelerated by the tremendous increase in Internet bandwidth and storage space, video data has been generated, published and spread explosively, becoming an indispensable part of today's big data. In this paper, we focus on reviewing two lines of research aiming to stimulate the comprehension of videos with deep learning: video classification and video captioning. While video classification concentrates on automatically labeling video clips based on their semantic contents like human actions or complex events, video captioning attempts to generate a complete and natural sentence, enriching the single label as in video classification, to capture the most informative dynamics in videos. In addition, we also provide a review of popular benchmarks and competitions, which are critical for evaluating the technical progress of this vibrant field.