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Modeling Context in Referring Expressions (1608.00272v3)

Published 31 Jul 2016 in cs.CV and cs.CL

Abstract: Humans refer to objects in their environments all the time, especially in dialogue with other people. We explore generating and comprehending natural language referring expressions for objects in images. In particular, we focus on incorporating better measures of visual context into referring expression models and find that visual comparison to other objects within an image helps improve performance significantly. We also develop methods to tie the language generation process together, so that we generate expressions for all objects of a particular category jointly. Evaluation on three recent datasets - RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, shows the advantages of our methods for both referring expression generation and comprehension.

Citations (1,099)

Summary

  • The paper introduces enhanced visual comparison features integrated with CNN and LSTM models to generate unambiguous referring expressions.
  • It employs joint language generation to mitigate duplicate expressions and boost comprehension accuracy across evaluated datasets.
  • Experimental results on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg demonstrate significant performance improvements over prior methods.

An Overview of "Modeling Context in Referring Expressions"

Introduction

The academic paper titled "Modeling Context in Referring Expressions" by Licheng Yu et al., addresses the crucial tasks of generating and comprehending natural language expressions that refer to specific objects within images. The paper presents advancements that particularly focus on the incorporation of enhanced measures of visual context into referring expression models. The incorporation of visual comparison methodologies to other objects within an image marks a significant leap in improving the accuracy and efficacy of these models.

Background and Motivation

Referring expression generation (REG) and comprehension have long been studied, dating back to early work that introduced foundational concepts like the Gricean Maxims for natural language dialogue interactions. The central idea is that to refer unambiguously to objects in complex scenes, models must synthesize visual attributes with effective natural language generation. Previous works largely explored these interactions under constrained datasets and simplistic settings. Addressing this, recent datasets and advances in deep learning techniques, such as those leveraging Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) networks, have propelled research into more realistic scenarios.

Contribution and Methodology

Yu et al. contribute by introducing sophisticated methods to incorporate visual context and joint language generation into REG and comprehension tasks. The paper builds on the baseline approach developed by Mao et al., which employed CNN features derived from ImageNet to extract visual and location attributes to feed into an LSTM network for REG. The main shortcomings of previous models were identified as the insufficient use of contextual information, specifically in terms of the object-on-object visual comparisons necessary for generating unambiguous expressions.

To address these, the authors propose several enhancements:

  1. Visual Comparison Features:
    • Introducing features that encode visual appearance differences between the target object and other objects of the same category in the image.
    • Computing location and size differences and incorporating these features.
    • Evaluating the influence of nearby objects by pooling the average differences across multiple scales of contextual windows centered on the target object.
  2. Joint Language Generation:
    • Developing an LSTM model that generates expressions for all depicted objects in an image together, permitting the model to utilize hidden state comparisons to avoid generating identical expressions for multiple objects.

Experimental Evaluations

The work is empirically validated on three large-scale referring expression datasets: RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg. The experimental results overwhelmingly demonstrate the efficacy of the authors' methods:

  • Visual Comparison: Inclusion of visual appearance and location difference representations significantly improved comprehension accuracy across all datasets. For instance, the "visdif" model outperformed the baseline by a considerable margin.
  • Joint Generation: The joint language generation model further enhanced performance by reducing ambiguities inherent in independently generated expressions. This improvement was consistent across automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR, as well as human evaluation metrics where the "visdif+MMI+tie" model achieved the highest human comprehension scores.

Moreover, new evaluation metrics introduced in the paper confirmed that models incorporating MMI and joint generation strategies produced fewer duplicate expressions for multiple objects within the same image.

Implications and Future Work

The advances proposed by Yu et al. hold significant theoretical and practical implications. By effectively utilizing detailed visual comparisons and joint language generation, these methods not only improve model accuracy but also push the boundaries of how AI interacts with visual and linguistic data. This holistic view of context in referring expressions paves the way for more robust human-computer interaction systems, especially in environments requiring precise communication, such as robotics and augmented reality.

Future developments might delve into more refined methods of pooling visual comparisons, further optimization of the joint language generation process, and broader applications to diverse vision-and-language tasks. Continued exploration could include integrating external knowledge bases to enhance contextual understanding and further reduce ambiguities in referring expressions.

Conclusion

The paper "Modeling Context in Referring Expressions" presents a significant advancement in the field of natural language and vision interaction. By enhancing visual context modeling and incorporating joint language generation, the authors have set a new benchmark for referring expression generation and comprehension. The robust experimental results highlight the practical applicability and theoretical depth of the proposed methods, setting a solid foundation for future research endeavors.