Attribute-Guided Attention for Referring Expression Generation and Comprehension

Referring expression is a special kind of verbal expression. The goal of referring expression is to refer to a particular object in some scenarios. Referring expression generation and comprehension are two inverse tasks within the field. Considering the critical role that visual attributes play in distinguishing the referred object from other objects, we propose an attribute-guided attention model to address the two tasks. In our proposed framework, attributes collected from referring expressions are used as explicit supervision signals on the generation and comprehension modules. The online predicted attributes of the visual object can benefit both tasks in two aspects: First, attributes can be directly embedded into the generation and comprehension modules, distinguishing the referred object as additional visual representations. Second, since attributes have their correspondence in both visual and textual space, an attribute-guided attention module is proposed as a bridging part to link the counterparts in visual representation and textual expression. Attention weights learned on both visual feature and word embeddings validate our motivation. We experiment on three standard datasets of RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg commonly used in this field. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. The experimental results show significant improvements over baseline methods, and are favorably comparable to the state-of-the-art results. Further ablation study and analysis clearly demonstrate the contribution of each module, which could provide useful inspirations to the community.