Papers › MemCap: Memorizing Style Knowledge for Image Captioning

MemCap: Memorizing Style Knowledge for Image Captioning

3 Apr 2020AAAI 2020 4archive 2025-07-28

Wentian Zhao, Xinxiao wu, Xiaoxun Zhang

Generating stylized captions for images is a challenging task since it requires not only describing the content of the image accurately but also expressing the desired linguistic style appropriately. In this paper, we propose MemCap, a novel stylized image captioning method that explicitly encodes the knowledge about linguistic styles with memory mechanism. Rather than relying heavily on a language model to capture style factors in existing methods, our method resorts to memorizing stylized elements learned from training corpus. Particularly, we design a memory module that comprises a set of embedding vectors for encoding style-related phrases in training corpus. To acquire the style-related phrases, we develop a sentence decomposing algorithm that splits a stylized sentence into a style-related part that reflects the linguistic style and a content-related part that contains the visual content. When generating captions, our MemCap first extracts content-relevant style knowledge from the memory module via an attention mechanism and then incorporates the extracted knowledge into a language model. Extensive experiments on two stylized image captioning datasets (SentiCap and FlickrStyle10K) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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Tasks

Image CaptioningLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingSentence

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Captioning FlickrStyle10K MemCap BLEU-1 (Romantic) 19.9 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

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