Recurrent Fusion Network for Image captioning

Wenhao Jiang, Lin Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang, Wei Liu, Tong Zhang; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 499-515

Recently, much advance has been made in image captioning, and an encoder-decoder framework has been adopted by all the state-of-the-art models. Under this framework, an input image is encoded by a convolutional neural network (CNN) and then translated into natural language with a recurrent neural network (RNN). The existing models counting on this framework employ only one kind of CNNs, extit{e.g.}, ResNet or Inception-X, which describes the image contents from only one specific view point. Thus, the semantic meaning of the input image cannot be comprehensively understood, which restricts improving the performance. In this paper, to exploit the complementary information from multiple encoders, we propose a novel recurrent fusion network (RFNet) for the image captioning task. The fusion process in our model can exploit the interactions among the outputs of the image encoders and generate new compact and informative representations for the decoder. Experiments on the MSCOCO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed RFNet, which sets a new state-of-the-art for image captioning.