Forced Attention for Image Captioning

Automatic generation of captions for a given image is an active research area in Artificial Intelligence. The architectures have evolved from using metadata of the images on which classical machine learning was employed to neural networks. Two different styles of architectures evolved in the neural network space for image captioning: Encoder-Attention-Decoder architecture, and the transformer architecture. This study is an attempt to modify the attention to allow any object to be specified. An archetypical Encoder-Attention-Decoder architecture (Show, Attend, and Tell (Xu et al., 2015)) is employed as a baseline for this study, and a modification of the Show, Attend, and Tell architecture is proposed. Both the architectures are evaluated on the MSCOCO (Lin et al., 2014) dataset, and seven metrics: BLEU – 1, 2, 3, 4 (Papineni, Roukos, Ward & Zhu, 2002), METEOR (Banerjee & Lavie, 2005), ROGUE L (Lin, 2004), and CIDer (Vedantam, Lawrence & Parikh, 2015) are calculated. Finally, the statistical significance of the results is evaluated by performing paired t tests.