Explicit Image Caption Editing

TL;DR

This paper introduces Explicit Caption Editing (ECE), a new task where models generate explicit edit sequences to refine image captions, making the process more explainable, efficient, and human-like, with a novel TIger model and new benchmarks.

Contribution

It proposes the first explicit caption editing framework with a non-autoregressive transformer model and creates new datasets for ECE research.

Findings

TIger effectively generates caption edits with high accuracy.

Explicit edit sequences improve interpretability and efficiency.

New benchmarks facilitate future ECE research.

Abstract

Given an image and a reference caption, the image caption editing task aims to correct the misalignment errors and generate a refined caption. However, all existing caption editing works are implicit models, ie, they directly produce the refined captions without explicit connections to the reference captions. In this paper, we introduce a new task: Explicit Caption Editing (ECE). ECE models explicitly generate a sequence of edit operations, and this edit operation sequence can translate the reference caption into a refined one. Compared to the implicit editing, ECE has multiple advantages: 1) Explainable: it can trace the whole editing path. 2) Editing Efficient: it only needs to modify a few words. 3) Human-like: it resembles the way that humans perform caption editing, and tries to keep original sentence structures. To solve this new task, we propose the first ECE model: TIger. TIger is a non-autoregressive transformer-based model, consisting of three modules: Tagger_del, Tagger_add, and Inserter. Specifically, Tagger_del decides whether each word should be preserved or not, Tagger_add decides where to add new words, and Inserter predicts the specific word for adding. To further facilitate ECE research, we propose two new ECE benchmarks by re-organizing two existing datasets, dubbed COCO-EE and Flickr30K-EE, respectively. Extensive ablations on both two benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of TIger.