Dual Graph Convolutional Networks with Transformer and Curriculum Learning for Image Captioning

Existing image captioning methods just focus on understanding the relationship between objects or instances in a single image, without exploring the contextual correlation existed among contextual image. In this paper, we propose Dual Graph Convolutional Networks (Dual-GCN) with transformer and curriculum learning for image captioning. In particular, we not only use an object-level GCN to capture the object to object spatial relation within a single image, but also adopt an image-level GCN to capture the feature information provided by similar images. With the well-designed Dual-GCN, we can make the linguistic transformer better understand the relationship between different objects in a single image and make full use of similar images as auxiliary information to generate a reasonable caption description for a single image. Meanwhile, with a cross-review strategy introduced to determine difficulty levels, we adopt curriculum learning as the training strategy to increase the robustness and generalization of our proposed model. We conduct extensive experiments on the large-scale MS COCO dataset, and the experimental results powerfully demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms recent state-of-the-art approaches. It achieves a BLEU-1 score of 82.2 and a BLEU-2 score of 67.6. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Unbear430/DGCN-for-image-captioning.