# Learning Compact Reward for Image Captioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10925 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10925/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Improving Generalization of Image Captioning with Unsupervised Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02862/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adversarial learning has shown its advances in generating natural and diverse descriptions in image captioning. However, the learned reward of existing adversarial methods is vague and ill-defined due to the reward ambiguity problem. In this paper, we propose a refined Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning (rAIRL) method to handle the reward ambiguity problem by disentangling reward for each word in a sentence, as well as achieve stable adversarial training by refining the loss function to shift the generator towards Nash equilibrium. In addition, we introduce a conditional term in the loss function to mitigate mode collapse and to increase the diversity of the generated descriptions. Our experiments on MS COCO and Flickr30K show that our method can learn compact reward for image captioning.