Non-Autoregressive Image Captioning with Counterfactuals-Critical Multi-Agent Learning

Non-Autoregressive Image Captioning with Counterfactuals-Critical Multi-Agent Learning

Longteng Guo, Jing Liu, Xinxin Zhu, Xingjian He, Jie Jiang, Hanqing Lu

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 767-773. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/107

Most image captioning models are autoregressive, i.e. they generate each word by conditioning on previously generated words, which leads to heavy latency during inference. Recently, non-autoregressive decoding has been proposed in machine translation to speed up the inference time by generating all words in parallel. Typically, these models use the word-level cross-entropy loss to optimize each word independently. However, such a learning process fails to consider the sentence-level consistency, thus resulting in inferior generation quality of these non-autoregressive models. In this paper, we propose a Non-Autoregressive Image Captioning (NAIC) model with a novel training paradigm: Counterfactuals-critical Multi-Agent Learning (CMAL). CMAL formulates NAIC as a multi-agent reinforcement learning system where positions in the target sequence are viewed as agents that learn to cooperatively maximize a sentence-level reward. Besides, we propose to utilize massive unlabeled images to boost captioning performance. Extensive experiments on MSCOCO image captioning benchmark show that our NAIC model achieves a performance comparable to state-of-the-art autoregressive models, while brings 13.9x decoding speedup.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Language and Vision
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Generation