Papers › A Hierarchical Approach for Generating Descriptive Image Paragraphs

A Hierarchical Approach for Generating Descriptive Image Paragraphs

20 Nov 2016CVPR 2017 7arXiv:1611.06607archive 2025-07-28

Jonathan Krause, Justin Johnson, Ranjay Krishna, Li Fei-Fei

Recent progress on image captioning has made it possible to generate novel sentences describing images in natural language, but compressing an image into a single sentence can describe visual content in only coarse detail. While one new captioning approach, dense captioning, can potentially describe images in finer levels of detail by captioning many regions within an image, it in turn is unable to produce a coherent story for an image. In this paper we overcome these limitations by generating entire paragraphs for describing images, which can tell detailed, unified stories. We develop a model that decomposes both images and paragraphs into their constituent parts, detecting semantic regions in images and using a hierarchical recurrent neural network to reason about language. Linguistic analysis confirms the complexity of the paragraph generation task, and thorough experiments on a new dataset of image and paragraph pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperPDFConference PDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="1611.06607")

Code

Syntology Ran 0 of 9 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 9 have no recorded run.

By repository: community (archive-listed): 9 samples from 1 repository, 0 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

9 samples harvested; 0 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 9 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

9unverified

Licence: 0 of the 9 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from InnerPeace-Wu/im2p-tensorflow. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

bbox_transform InnerPeace-Wu/im2p-tensorflow/lib/fast_rcnn/bbox_transform.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 84dcf978d5570762 · report
bbox_transform_inv InnerPeace-Wu/im2p-tensorflow/lib/fast_rcnn/bbox_transform.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 6b2ace662cea2a36 · report
box2xywh InnerPeace-Wu/im2p-tensorflow/lib/dense_cap/vis_whtml.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 76b2a70a88afbf78 · report
clip_boxes InnerPeace-Wu/im2p-tensorflow/lib/fast_rcnn/bbox_transform.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · d24c99284beca7a6 · report
get_imdb InnerPeace-Wu/im2p-tensorflow/lib/datasets/factory.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 9f3cea1708a8a9db · report
get_output_dir InnerPeace-Wu/im2p-tensorflow/lib/config.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 4786edbc775d299d · report
get_output_tb_dir InnerPeace-Wu/im2p-tensorflow/lib/config.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 97f5f6cd7eab1c78 · report
initialize_vocabulary InnerPeace-Wu/im2p-tensorflow/lib/pre_glove.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 9292d54e38364142 · report
vis_whtml InnerPeace-Wu/im2p-tensorflow/lib/dense_cap/vis_whtml.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 1ea786fdfcc714c3 · report

Tasks

Dense CaptioningDescriptiveImage CaptioningImage Paragraph CaptioningSentence

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

Image Paragraph Captioning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Paragraph Captioning Image Paragraph Captioning Regions-Hierarchical (ours) BLEU-4 8.69 #7 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Image Paragraph Captioning Image Paragraph Captioning Regions-Hierarchical (ours) CIDEr 13.52 #7 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Image Paragraph Captioning Image Paragraph Captioning Regions-Hierarchical (ours) METEOR 15.95 #7 of 10 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections