Top-down visual attention mechanisms have been used extensively in image captioning and visual question answering (VQA) to enable deeper image understanding through fine-grained analysis and even multiple steps of reasoning. In this work, we propose a combined bottom-up and topdown attention mechanism that enables attention to be calculated at the level of objects and other salient image regions. This is the natural basis for attention to be considered. Within our approach, the bottom-up mechanism (based on Faster R-CNN) proposes image regions, each with an associated feature vector, while the top-down mechanism determines feature weightings. Applying this approach to image captioning, our results on the MSCOCO test server establish a new state-of-the-art for the task, achieving CIDEr / SPICE / BLEU-4 scores of 117.9, 21.5 and 36.9, respectively. Demonstrating the broad applicability of the method, applying the same approach to VQA we obtain first place in the 2017 VQA Challenge.

自动在自然语言中自动生成图像的描述称为图像字幕。这是一个积极的研究主题，位于人工智能，计算机视觉和自然语言处理中两个主要领域的交集。图像字幕是图像理解中的重要挑战之一，因为它不仅需要识别图像中的显着对象，还需要其属性及其相互作用的方式。然后，系统必须生成句法和语义上正确的标题，该标题描述了自然语言的图像内容。鉴于深度学习模型的重大进展及其有效编码大量图像并生成正确句子的能力，最近已经提出了几种基于神经的字幕方法，每种方法都试图达到更好的准确性和标题质量。本文介绍了一个基于编码器的图像字幕系统，其中编码器使用以RESNET-101作为骨干为骨干来提取图像中每个区域的空间和全局特征。此阶段之后是一个精致的模型，该模型使用注意力进行注意的机制来提取目标图像对象的视觉特征，然后确定其相互作用。解码器由一个基于注意力的复发模块和一个反思性注意模块组成，该模块会协作地将注意力应用于视觉和文本特征，以增强解码器对长期顺序依赖性建模的能力。在两个基准数据集（MSCOCO和FLICKR30K）上进行的广泛实验显示了提出的方法和生成的字幕的高质量。

图像字幕显示可以通过使用场景图来表示图像中对象的关系来实现更好的性能。当前字幕编码器通常使用图形卷积网（GCN）来表示关系信息，并通过串联或卷积将其与对象区域特征合并，以获取句子解码的最终输入。但是，由于两个原因，现有方法中基于GCN的编码器在字幕上的有效性较小。首先，使用图像字幕作为目标（即最大似然估计），而不是以关系为中心的损失无法完全探索编码器的潜力。其次，使用预训练的模型代替编码器本身提取关系不是灵活的，并且不能有助于模型的解释性。为了提高图像字幕的质量，我们提出了一个新颖的体系结构改革者 - 一种关系变压器，可以生成具有嵌入关系信息的功能，并明确表达图像中对象之间的成对关系。改革者将场景图的生成目标与使用一个修改后的变压器模型的图像字幕结合在一起。这种设计使改革者不仅可以通过提取强大的关系图像特征的利益生成更好的图像标题，还可以生成场景图，以明确描述配对关系。公开可用数据集的实验表明，我们的模型在图像字幕和场景图生成上的最先进方法明显优于最先进的方法

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications have sparked extraordinary interest in recent years. This achievement can be ascribed in part to advances in AI subfields including Machine Learning (ML), Computer Vision (CV), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Deep learning, a sub-field of machine learning that employs artificial neural network concepts, has enabled the most rapid growth in these domains. The integration of vision and language has sparked a lot of attention as a result of this. The tasks have been created in such a way that they properly exemplify the concepts of deep learning. In this review paper, we provide a thorough and an extensive review of the state of the arts approaches, key models design principles and discuss existing datasets, methods, their problem formulation and evaluation measures for VQA and Visual reasoning tasks to understand vision and language representation learning. We also present some potential future paths in this field of research, with the hope that our study may generate new ideas and novel approaches to handle existing difficulties and develop new applications.

连接视觉和语言在生成智能中起着重要作用。因此，已经致力于图像标题的大型研究工作，即用句法和语义有意义的句子描述图像。从2015年开始，该任务通常通过由Visual Encoder组成的管道和文本生成的语言模型来解决任务。在这些年来，两种组件通过对象区域，属性，介绍多模态连接，完全关注方法和伯特早期融合策略的利用而显着发展。但是，无论令人印象深刻的结果，图像标题的研究还没有达到结论性答案。这项工作旨在提供图像标题方法的全面概述，从视觉编码和文本生成到培训策略，数据集和评估度量。在这方面，我们量化地比较了许多相关的最先进的方法来确定架构和培训策略中最有影响力的技术创新。此外，讨论了问题的许多变体及其开放挑战。这项工作的最终目标是作为理解现有文献的工具，并突出显示计算机视觉和自然语言处理的研究领域的未来方向可以找到最佳的协同作用。

It is always well believed that modeling relationships between objects would be helpful for representing and eventually describing an image. Nevertheless, there has not been evidence in support of the idea on image description generation. In this paper, we introduce a new design to explore the connections between objects for image captioning under the umbrella of attention-based encoder-decoder framework. Specifically, we present Graph Convolutional Networks plus Long Short-Term Memory (dubbed as GCN-LSTM) architecture that novelly integrates both semantic and spatial object relationships into image encoder. Technically, we build graphs over the detected objects in an image based on their spatial and semantic connections. The representations of each region proposed on objects are then refined by leveraging graph structure through GCN. With the learnt region-level features, our GCN-LSTM capitalizes on LSTM-based captioning framework with attention mechanism for sentence generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on COCO image captioning dataset, and superior results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. More remarkably, GCN-LSTM increases CIDEr-D performance from 120.1% to 128.7% on COCO testing set.

This paper presents stacked attention networks (SANs) that learn to answer natural language questions from images. SANs use semantic representation of a question as query to search for the regions in an image that are related to the answer. We argue that image question answering (QA) often requires multiple steps of reasoning. Thus, we develop a multiple-layer SAN in which we query an image multiple times to infer the answer progressively. Experiments conducted on four image QA data sets demonstrate that the proposed SANs significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches. The visualization of the attention layers illustrates the progress that the SAN locates the relevant visual clues that lead to the answer of the question layer-by-layer.

Visual attention has been successfully applied in structural prediction tasks such as visual captioning and question answering. Existing visual attention models are generally spatial, i.e., the attention is modeled as spatial probabilities that re-weight the last conv-layer feature map of a CNN encoding an input image. However, we argue that such spatial attention does not necessarily conform to the attention mechanism -a dynamic feature extractor that combines contextual fixations over time, as CNN features are naturally spatial, channel-wise and multi-layer. In this paper, we introduce a novel convolutional neural network dubbed SCA-CNN that incorporates Spatial and Channelwise Attentions in a CNN. In the task of image captioning, SCA-CNN dynamically modulates the sentence generation context in multi-layer feature maps, encoding where (i.e., attentive spatial locations at multiple layers) and what (i.e., attentive channels) the visual attention is. We evaluate the proposed SCA-CNN architecture on three benchmark image captioning datasets: Flickr8K, Flickr30K, and MSCOCO. It is consistently observed that SCA-CNN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art visual attention-based image captioning methods.1 Each convolutional layer is optionally followed by a pooling, downsampling, normalization, or a fully connected layer.

图像字幕的当前最新方法采用基于区域的特征，因为它们提供了对象级信息，对于描述图像的内容至关重要；它们通常由对象检测器（例如更快的R-CNN）提取。但是，他们有几个问题，例如缺乏上下文信息，不准确检测的风险以及高计算成本。可以通过使用基于网格的功能来解决前两个。但是，如何提取和融合这两种功能是未知的。本文提出了一种仅使用变压器的神经结构，称为砂砾（基于网格和区域的图像字幕变压器），该构建物有效地利用了两个视觉特征来生成更好的字幕。粒度用基于DITR的方法代替了以前方法中使用的基于CNN的检测器，从而使其更快地计算。此外，它的整体设计仅由变压器组成，可以对模型进行端到端的训练。这种创新的设计和双重视觉功能的集成带来了重大的性能提高。几个图像字幕基准的实验结果表明，砂砾的推论准确性和速度优于先前的方法。

图像标题是自动生成句子的任务，以最好的方式生成描述输入图像。最近用于自动生成图像标题的最成功的技术最近使用了细心的深度学习模型。设计了深入学习模型的设计方式有变化。在本调查中，我们为图像标题的细心深度学习模型提供了相关的文献述评。而不是对深度图像标题模型的所有先前工作进行全面审查，我们解释了用于深度学习模型中的图像标题任务的各种类型的注意机制。用于图像标题的最成功的深度学习模型遵循编码器解码器架构，尽管这些模型采用注意机制的方式存在差异。通过分析图像标题的不同细节深层模型的性能结果，我们的目标是在图像标题中找到深度模型中最成功的注意机制。柔软的关注，自下而上的关注和多主题是一种广泛应用于图像标题的最先进的深度学习模型的关注机构的类型。在当前时，最佳结果是从多针关注的变体实现的，以自下而上的关注。

This paper presents a detailed study of improving visual representations for vision language (VL) tasks and develops an improved object detection model to provide object-centric representations of images. Compared to the most widely used bottom-up and top-down model [2], the new model is bigger, better-designed for VL tasks, and pre-trained on much larger training corpora that combine multiple public annotated object detection datasets. Therefore, it can generate representations of a richer collection of visual objects and concepts. While previous VL research focuses mainly on improving the vision-language fusion model and leaves the object detection model improvement untouched, we show that visual features matter significantly in VL models. In our experiments we feed the visual features generated by the new object detection model into a Transformer-based VL fusion model OSCAR [21], and utilize an improved approach OSCAR+ to pre-train the VL model and fine-tune it on a wide range of downstream VL tasks. Our results show that the new visual features significantly improve the performance across all VL tasks, creating new state-of-the-art results on seven public benchmarks. Code, models and pre-extracted features are released at https://github.com/pzzhang/VinVL. ♥ Microsoft Corporation♠ University of Washington † indicates equal contributions.

We propose the task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer. Mirroring real-world scenarios, such as helping the visually impaired, both the questions and answers are open-ended. Visual questions selectively target different areas of an image, including background details and underlying context. As a result, a system that succeeds at VQA typically needs a more detailed understanding of the image and complex reasoning than a system producing generic image captions. Moreover, VQA is amenable to automatic evaluation, since many open-ended answers contain only a few words or a closed set of answers that can be provided in a multiple-choice format. We provide a dataset containing ∼0.25M images, ∼0.76M questions, and ∼10M answers (www.visualqa.org), and discuss the information it provides. Numerous baselines and methods for VQA are provided and compared with human performance. Our VQA demo is available on CloudCV (http://cloudcv.org/vqa).

This paper presents a unified Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) model. The model is unified in that (1) it can be finetuned for either vision-language generation (e.g., image captioning) or understanding (e.g., visual question answering) tasks, and (2) it uses a shared multi-layer transformer network for both encoding and decoding, which differs from many existing methods where the encoder and decoder are implemented using separate models. The unified VLP model is pre-trained on a large amount of image-text pairs using the unsupervised learning objectives of two tasks: bidirectional and sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) masked vision-language prediction. The two tasks differ solely in what context the prediction conditions on. This is controlled by utilizing specific self-attention masks for the shared transformer network. To the best of our knowledge, VLP is the first reported model that achieves state-of-the-art results on both vision-language generation and understanding tasks, as disparate as image captioning and visual question answering, across three challenging benchmark datasets: COCO Captions, Flickr30k Captions, and VQA 2.0. The code and the pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/LuoweiZhou/VLP.

Large-scale pre-training methods of learning cross-modal representations on image-text pairs are becoming popular for vision-language tasks. While existing methods simply concatenate image region features and text features as input to the model to be pre-trained and use selfattention to learn image-text semantic alignments in a brute force manner, in this paper, we propose a new learning method Oscar 1 , which uses object tags detected in images as anchor points to significantly ease the learning of alignments. Our method is motivated by the observation that the salient objects in an image can be accurately detected, and are often mentioned in the paired text. We pre-train an Oscar model on the public corpus of 6.5 million text-image pairs, and fine-tune it on downstream tasks, creating new state-of-the-arts on six well-established vision-language understanding and generation tasks. 2

通用视觉（GPV）系统是旨在解决各种视觉任务的模型，而无需进行架构更改。如今，GPV主要从大型完全监督的数据集中学习技能和概念。通过获取数据以迅速学习每个技能的每个概念，将GPV扩展到数万个概念都变得令人望而却步。这项工作提出了一种有效且廉价的替代方法：从监督数据集中学习技能，从Web图像搜索中学习概念，并利用GPV的关键特征：跨技能传递视觉知识的能力。我们使用跨越10K+视觉概念的1M+图像的数据集来演示3个基准上的两个现有GPV（GPV-1和VL-T5）的Webly Supumented概念扩展：5个基于可可的数据集（80个主要概念），这是一个新的策划系列，这是一个新的策划系列。基于OpenImages和VisualGenome存储库（〜500个概念）以及Web衍生的数据集（10K+概念）的5个数据集。我们还提出了一种新的体系结构GPV-2，该架构支持各种任务 - 从分类和本地化等视觉任务到Qu Viewer+语言任务，例如QA和字幕，再到更多的利基市场，例如人类对象互动检测。 GPV-2从Web数据中受益匪浅，并且在这些基准测试中胜过GPV-1和VL-T5。我们的数据，代码和Web演示可在https://prior.allenai.org/projects/gpv2上获得。

Attention mechanisms are widely used in current encoder/decoder frameworks of image captioning, where a weighted average on encoded vectors is generated at each time step to guide the caption decoding process. However, the decoder has little idea of whether or how well the attended vector and the given attention query are related, which could make the decoder give misled results. In this paper, we propose an "Attention on Attention" (AoA) module, which extends the conventional attention mechanisms to determine the relevance between attention results and queries. AoA first generates an "information vector" and an "attention gate" using the attention result and the current context, then adds another attention by applying element-wise multiplication to them and finally obtains the "attended information", the expected useful knowledge. We apply AoA to both the encoder and the decoder of our image captioning model, which we name as AoA Network (AoANet). Experiments show that AoANet outperforms all previously published methods and achieves a new state-ofthe-art performance of 129.8 CIDEr-D score on MS COCO "Karpathy" offline test split and 129.6 CIDEr-D (C40) score on the official online testing server. Code is available at https://github.com/husthuaan/AoANet.

Automatically generating a natural language description of an image has attracted interests recently both because of its importance in practical applications and because it connects two major artificial intelligence fields: computer vision and natural language processing. Existing approaches are either top-down, which start from a gist of an image and convert it into words, or bottom-up, which come up with words describing various aspects of an image and then combine them. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that combines both approaches through a model of semantic attention. Our algorithm learns to selectively attend to semantic concept proposals and fuse them into hidden states and outputs of recurrent neural networks.The selection and fusion form a feedback connecting the top-down and bottom-up computation. We evaluate our algorithm on two public benchmarks: Microsoft COCO and Flickr30K. Experimental results show that our algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches consistently across different evaluation metrics.

We present ViLBERT (short for Vision-and-Language BERT), a model for learning task-agnostic joint representations of image content and natural language. We extend the popular BERT architecture to a multi-modal two-stream model, processing both visual and textual inputs in separate streams that interact through co-attentional transformer layers. We pretrain our model through two proxy tasks on the large, automatically collected Conceptual Captions dataset and then transfer it to multiple established vision-and-language tasks -visual question answering, visual commonsense reasoning, referring expressions, and caption-based image retrieval -by making only minor additions to the base architecture. We observe significant improvements across tasks compared to existing task-specific modelsachieving state-of-the-art on all four tasks. Our work represents a shift away from learning groundings between vision and language only as part of task training and towards treating visual grounding as a pretrainable and transferable capability.Preprint. Under review.

视觉模型可以评估图像中的视觉上下文并生成描述性文本。尽管生成的文本可能是准确且句法正确的，但通常过于笼统。为了解决这个问题，最近的工作使用光学特征识别来补充视觉信息，并从图像中提取的文本进行补充。在这项工作中，我们认为，视觉模型可以受益于可以从图像中提取但不使用当前模型使用的其他信息。我们修改了以前的多模式框架，以接受来自任意数量的辅助分类器的相关信息。特别是，我们将重点放在人的名字作为附加令牌上，并创建一个新颖的图像捕获数据集，以促进用人名称的字幕。标题（PAC）中的数据集，政客和运动员包括背景下知名人士的字幕图像。通过使用此数据集对预处理的模型进行微调，我们演示了一个模型，该模型可以自然地将面部识别令牌纳入生成的文本中，通过培训有限的数据。对于PAC数据集，我们提供有关集合和基线基准分数的讨论。

We propose a method that can generate an unambiguous description (known as a referring expression) of a specific object or region in an image, and which can also comprehend or interpret such an expression to infer which object is being described. We show that our method outperforms previous methods that generate descriptions of objects without taking into account other potentially ambiguous objects in the scene. Our model is inspired by recent successes of deep learning methods for image captioning, but while image captioning is difficult to evaluate, our task allows for easy objective evaluation. We also present a new large-scale dataset for referring expressions, based on MS-COCO. We have released the dataset and a toolbox for visualization and evaluation, see https://github.com/ mjhucla/Google_Refexp_toolbox.