Weakly-Supervised Generation and Grounding of Visual Descriptions with Conditional Generative Models

Given weak supervision from image- or video-caption pairs, we address the problem of grounding (localizing) each object word of a ground-truth or generated sentence describing a visual input. Recent weakly-supervised approaches leverage region proposals and ground words based on the region attention coefficients of captioning models. To predict each next word in the sentence they attend over regions using a summary of the previous words as a query, and then ground the word by selecting the most attended regions. However, this leads to sub-optimal grounding, since attention coefficients are computed without taking into account the word that needs to be localized. To address this shortcoming, we propose a novel Grounded Visual Description Conditional Variational Autoencoder (GVD-CVAE) and leverage its latent variables for grounding. In particular, we introduce a discrete random variable that models each word-to-region alignment, and learn its approximate posterior distribution given the full sentence. Experiments on challenging image and video datasets (Flickr30k Entities, YouCook2, ActivityNet Entities) validate the effectiveness of our conditional generative model, showing that it can substantially outperform soft-attention-based baselines in grounding.