Full-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning

The Transformer-based approach represents the state-of-the-art in image captioning. However, existing studies have shown Transformer has a problem that irrelevant tokens with overlapping neighbors incorrectly attend to each other with relatively large attention scores. We believe that this limitatio...

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Main Authors: Tongwei Lu, Jiarong Wang, Fen Min
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2023-01-01
Series:Symmetry
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/15/1/190
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author Tongwei Lu
Jiarong Wang
Fen Min
author_facet Tongwei Lu
Jiarong Wang
Fen Min
author_sort Tongwei Lu
collection DOAJ
description The Transformer-based approach represents the state-of-the-art in image captioning. However, existing studies have shown Transformer has a problem that irrelevant tokens with overlapping neighbors incorrectly attend to each other with relatively large attention scores. We believe that this limitation is due to the incompleteness of the Self-Attention Network (SAN) and Feed-Forward Network (FFN). To solve this problem, we present the Full-Memory Transformer method for image captioning. The method improves the performance of both image encoding and language decoding. In the image encoding step, we propose the Full-LN symmetric structure, which enables stable training and better model generalization performance by symmetrically embedding Layer Normalization on both sides of the SAN and FFN. In the language decoding step, we propose the Memory Attention Network (MAN), which extends the traditional attention mechanism to determine the correlation between attention results and input sequences, guiding the model to focus on the words that need to be attended to. Our method is evaluated on the MS COCO dataset and achieves good performance, improving the result in terms of BLEU-4 from 38.4 to 39.3.
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spelling doaj.art-ee013be9068c439da3587dbec6fc71822023-12-01T00:53:14ZengMDPI AGSymmetry2073-89942023-01-0115119010.3390/sym15010190Full-Memory Transformer for Image CaptioningTongwei Lu0Jiarong Wang1Fen Min2School of Computer Science and Engineering, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan 430205, ChinaSchool of Computer Science and Engineering, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan 430205, ChinaSchool of Computer Science and Engineering, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan 430205, ChinaThe Transformer-based approach represents the state-of-the-art in image captioning. However, existing studies have shown Transformer has a problem that irrelevant tokens with overlapping neighbors incorrectly attend to each other with relatively large attention scores. We believe that this limitation is due to the incompleteness of the Self-Attention Network (SAN) and Feed-Forward Network (FFN). To solve this problem, we present the Full-Memory Transformer method for image captioning. The method improves the performance of both image encoding and language decoding. In the image encoding step, we propose the Full-LN symmetric structure, which enables stable training and better model generalization performance by symmetrically embedding Layer Normalization on both sides of the SAN and FFN. In the language decoding step, we propose the Memory Attention Network (MAN), which extends the traditional attention mechanism to determine the correlation between attention results and input sequences, guiding the model to focus on the words that need to be attended to. Our method is evaluated on the MS COCO dataset and achieves good performance, improving the result in terms of BLEU-4 from 38.4 to 39.3.https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/15/1/190transformerattentionimage captioningsymmetric
spellingShingle Tongwei Lu
Jiarong Wang
Fen Min
Full-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning
Symmetry
transformer
attention
image captioning
symmetric
title Full-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning
title_full Full-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning
title_fullStr Full-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning
title_full_unstemmed Full-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning
title_short Full-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning
title_sort full memory transformer for image captioning
topic transformer
attention
image captioning
symmetric
url https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/15/1/190
work_keys_str_mv AT tongweilu fullmemorytransformerforimagecaptioning
AT jiarongwang fullmemorytransformerforimagecaptioning
AT fenmin fullmemorytransformerforimagecaptioning