skip to main content


Title: Joint Commonsense and Relation Reasoning for Image and Video Captioning
Exploiting relationships between objects for image and video captioning has received increasing attention. Most existing methods depend heavily on pre-trained detectors of objects and their relationships, and thus may not work well when facing detection challenges such as heavy occlusion, tiny-size objects, and long-tail classes. In this paper, we propose a joint commonsense and relation reasoning method that exploits prior knowledge for image and video captioning without relying on any detectors. The prior knowledge provides semantic correlations and constraints between objects, serving as guidance to build semantic graphs that summarize object relationships, some of which cannot be directly perceived from images or videos. Particularly, our method is implemented by an iterative learning algorithm that alternates between 1) commonsense reasoning for embedding visual regions into the semantic space to build a semantic graph and 2) relation reasoning for encoding semantic graphs to generate sentences. Experiments on several benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our prior knowledge-based approach.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1813709 1722847
NSF-PAR ID:
10169172
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
ISSN:
2159-5399
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. This paper presents a unified grammatical framework capable of reconstructing a variety of scene types (e.g., urban, campus, country etc.) from a single input image. The key idea of our approach is to study a novel commonsense reasoning framework that mainly exploits two types of prior knowledge: (i) prior distributions over a single dimension of objects, e.g., that the length of a sedan is about 4.5 meters; (ii) pair-wise relationships between the dimensions of scene entities, e.g., that the length of a sedan is shorter than a bus. These unary or relative geometric knowledge, once extracted, are fairly stable across different types of natural scenes, and are informative for enhancing the understanding of various scenes in both 2D images and 3D world. Methodologically, we propose to construct a hierarchical graph representation as a unified representation of the input image and related geometric knowledge. We formulate these objectives with a unified probabilistic formula and develop a data-driven Monte Carlo method to infer the optimal solution with both bottom-to-up and top-down computations. Results with comparisons on public datasets showed that our method clearly outperforms the alternative methods. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    Interest in physical therapy and individual exercises such as yoga/dance has increased alongside the well-being trend, and people globally enjoy such exercises at home/office via video streaming platforms. However, such exercises are hard to follow without expert guidance. Even if experts can help, it is almost impossible to give personalized feedback to every trainee remotely. Thus, automated pose correction systems are required more than ever, and we introduce a new captioning dataset named FixMyPose to address this need. We collect natural language descriptions of correcting a “current” pose to look like a “target” pose. To support a multilingual setup, we collect descriptions in both English and Hindi. The collected descriptions have interesting linguistic properties such as egocentric relations to the environment objects, analogous references, etc., requiring an understanding of spatial relations and commonsense knowledge about postures. Further, to avoid ML biases, we maintain a balance across characters with diverse demographics, who perform a variety of movements in several interior environments (e.g., homes, offices). From our FixMyPose dataset, we introduce two tasks: the pose-correctional-captioning task and its reverse, the target-pose-retrieval task. During the correctional-captioning task, models must generate the descriptions of how to move from the current to the target pose image, whereas in the retrieval task, models should select the correct target pose given the initial pose and the correctional description. We present strong cross-attention baseline models (uni/multimodal, RL, multilingual) and also show that our baselines are competitive with other models when evaluated on other image-difference datasets. We also propose new task-specific metrics (object-match, body-part-match, direction-match) and conduct human evaluation for more reliable evaluation, and we demonstrate a large human-model performance gap suggesting room for promising future work. Finally, to verify the sim-to-real transfer of our FixMyPose dataset, we collect a set of real images and show promising performance on these images. Data and code are available: https://fixmypose-unc.github.io. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    Captioning is a crucial and challenging task for video understanding. In videos that involve active agents such as humans, the agent{'}s actions can bring about myriad changes in the scene. Observable changes such as movements, manipulations, and transformations of the objects in the scene, are reflected in conventional video captioning. Unlike images, actions in videos are also inherently linked to social aspects such as intentions (why the action is taking place), effects (what changes due to the action), and attributes that describe the agent. Thus for video understanding, such as when captioning videos or when answering questions about videos, one must have an understanding of these commonsense aspects. We present the first work on generating \textit{commonsense} captions directly from videos, to describe latent aspects such as intentions, effects, and attributes. We present a new dataset {``}Video-to-Commonsense (V2C){''} that contains {\textasciitilde}9k videos of human agents performing various actions, annotated with 3 types of commonsense descriptions. Additionally we explore the use of open-ended video-based commonsense question answering (V2C-QA) as a way to enrich our captions. Both the generation task and the QA task can be used to enrich video captions. 
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    Understanding the meaning of a text is a fundamental challenge of natural language understanding (NLU) research. An ideal NLU system should process a language in a way that is not exclusive to a single task or a dataset. Keeping this in mind, we have introduced a novel knowledge driven semantic representation approach for English text. By leveraging the VerbNet lexicon, we are able to map syntax tree of the text to its commonsense meaning represented using basic knowledge primitives. The general purpose knowledge represented from our approach can be used to build any reasoning based NLU system that can also provide justification. We applied this approach to construct two NLU applications that we present here: SQuARE (Semantic-based Question Answering and Reasoning Engine) and StaCACK (Stateful Conversational Agent using Commonsense Knowledge). Both these systems work by ``truly understanding'' the natural language text they process and both provide natural language explanations for their responses while maintaining high accuracy. 
    more » « less
  5. Object proposal generation serves as a standard pre-processing step in Vision-Language (VL) tasks (image captioning, visual question answering, etc.). The performance of object proposals generated for VL tasks is currently evaluated across all available annotations, a protocol that we show is misaligned - higher scores do not necessarily correspond to improved performance on downstream VL tasks. Our work serves as a study of this phenomenon and explores the effectiveness of semantic grounding to mitigate its effects. To this end, we propose evaluating object proposals against only a subset of available annotations, selected by thresholding an annotation importance score. Importance of object annotations to VL tasks is quantified by extracting relevant semantic information from text describing the image. We show that our method is consistent and demonstrates greatly improved alignment with annotations selected by image captioning metrics and human annotation when compared against existing techniques. Lastly, we compare current detectors used in the Scene Graph Generation (SGG) benchmark as a use case, which serves as an example of when traditional object proposal evaluation techniques are misaligned. 
    more » « less