Papers › Meshed-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning
Meshed-Memory Transformer for Image Captioning
Marcella Cornia, Matteo Stefanini, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
Transformer-based architectures represent the state of the art in sequence modeling tasks like machine translation and language understanding. Their applicability to multi-modal contexts like image captioning, however, is still largely under-explored. With the aim of filling this gap, we present M² - a Meshed Transformer with Memory for Image Captioning. The architecture improves both the image encoding and the language generation steps: it learns a multi-level representation of the relationships between image regions integrating learned a priori knowledge, and uses a mesh-like connectivity at decoding stage to exploit low- and high-level features. Experimentally, we investigate the performance of the M² Transformer and different fully-attentive models in comparison with recurrent ones. When tested on COCO, our proposal achieves a new state of the art in single-model and ensemble configurations on the "Karpathy" test split and on the online test server. We also assess its performances when describing objects unseen in the training set. Trained models and code for reproducing the experiments are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/meshed-memory-transformer.
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Code
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Captioning | COCO (Common Objects in Context) | M2 Transformer | CIDEr | 131.2 | #2 of 17 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions | Meshed-Memory Transformer | BLEU-1 | 80.8 | #25 of 41 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions | Meshed-Memory Transformer | BLEU-4 | 39.1 | #25 of 41 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions | Meshed-Memory Transformer | CIDER | 131.2 | #25 of 41 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions | Meshed-Memory Transformer | METEOR | 29.2 | #25 of 41 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions | Meshed-Memory Transformer | ROUGE-L | 58.6 | #25 of 41 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions | Meshed-Memory Transformer | SPICE | 22.6 | #25 of 41 | 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.
Methods
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