IMAGE CAPTIONING WITH ATTRIBUTE REFINEMENT

Semantic attention has long been adopted to image captioning models to enhance the image captioning performances. The models pre-trained for attribute recognition are utilized to generate image attributes in image captioning. Generally, these models are not jointly trained with image captioning models. In this paper, we propose attribute refinement network, which incorporates attribute recognition with image captioning to boost the performance on both tasks. We model the correlation between attributes with the semantic information from image captioning to improve the recognition accuracy. In turn, better attribute recognition results effectively enhance image captioning performance. Our model achieves CIDEr-D/SPICE scores of 115.1 and 20.9 respectively on the MS COCO test set, comprehensively yields improvement over all compared methods.