Referring Expression Generation and Comprehension via Attributes

Referring expression is a kind of language expression that used for referring to particular objects. To make the expression without ambiguation, people often use attributes to describe the particular object. In this paper, we explore the role of attributes by incorporating them into both referring expression generation and comprehension. We first train an attribute learning model from visual objects and their paired descriptions. Then in the generation task, we take the learned attributes as the input into the generation model, thus the expressions are generated driven by both attributes and the previous words. For comprehension, we embed the learned attributes with visual features and semantics into the common space model, then the target object is retrieved based on its ranking distance in the common space. Experimental results on the three standard datasets, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg show significant improvements over the baseline model, demonstrating that our method is effective for both tasks.