# Matching Visual Features to Hierarchical Semantic Topics for Image Paragraph Captioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04143 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04143/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [Speech Recognition with Deep Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.5778/) (2013)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [Generating Radiology Reports via Memory-driven Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16056/) (2020)
- [Meshed-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08226/) (2019)
- [Attention on Attention for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06954/) (2019)
- [Autoencoding Variational Inference For Topic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01488/) (2017)
- [Neural Variational Inference for Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06038/) (2015)
- [A Hierarchical Approach for Generating Descriptive Image Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06607/) (2016)
- [Topic Modelling Meets Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00498/) (2021)
- [WHAI: Weibull Hybrid Autoencoding Inference for Deep Topic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01328/) (2018)
- [Recurrent Topic-Transition GAN for Visual Paragraph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07022/) (2017)
- [A Discriminative CNN Video Representation for Event Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4006/) (2014)
- [Gamma Belief Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03081/) (2015)
- [Diverse and Coherent Paragraph Generation from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00681/) (2018)
- [Deep Latent Dirichlet Allocation with Topic-Layer-Adaptive Stochastic Gradient Riemannian MCMC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01724/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Auto-encoding of Sentence Topics for Image Paragraph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00249/) (2019)
- [Topic-Guided Attention for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03514/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Visual Clues: Bridging Vision and Language Foundations for Image Paragraph Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01843/) (2022)
- [A Fine-Grained Image Description Generation Method Based on Joint Objectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12799/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Observing a set of images and their corresponding paragraph-captions, a challenging task is to learn how to produce a semantically coherent paragraph to describe the visual content of an image. Inspired by recent successes in integrating semantic topics into this task, this paper develops a plug-and-play hierarchical-topic-guided image paragraph generation framework, which couples a visual extractor with a deep topic model to guide the learning of a language model. To capture the correlations between the image and text at multiple levels of abstraction and learn the semantic topics from images, we design a variational inference network to build the mapping from image features to textual captions. To guide the paragraph generation, the learned hierarchical topics and visual features are integrated into the language model, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Transformer, and jointly optimized. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed models, which are competitive with many state-of-the-art approaches in terms of standard evaluation metrics, can be used to both distill interpretable multi-layer semantic topics and generate diverse and coherent captions. We release our code at https://github.com/DandanGuo1993/VTCM-based-image-paragraph-caption.git