Adapting Generative Pre-trained Language Model for Open-domain Multimodal Sentence Summarization

Multimodal sentence summarization, aiming to generate a brief summary of the source sentence and image, is a new yet challenging task. Although existing methods have achieved compelling success, they still suffer from two key limitations: 1) lacking the adaptation of generative pre-trained language models for open-domain MMSS, and 2) lacking the explicit critical information modeling. To address these limitations, we propose a BART-MMSS framework, where BART is adopted as the backbone. To be specific, we propose a prompt-guided image encoding module to extract the source image feature. It leverages several soft to-be-learned prompts for image patch embedding, which facilitates the visual content injection to BART for open-domain MMSS tasks. Thereafter, we devise an explicit source critical token learning module to directly capture the critical tokens of the source sentence with the reference of the source image, where we incorporate explicit supervision to improve performance. Extensive experiments on a public dataset fully validate the superiority of our proposed method. In addition, the predicted tokens by the vision-guided key-token highlighting module can be easily understood by humans and hence improve the interpretability of our model.