PCATNet: Position-Class Awareness Transformer for Image Captioning

Existing image captioning models usually build the relation between visual information and words to generate captions,which lack spatial infor-mation and object classes.To address the issue,we propose a novel Position-Class Awareness Transformer(PCAT)network which can serve as a bridge between the visual features and captions by embedding spatial information and awareness of object classes.In our proposal,we construct our PCAT network by proposing a novel Grid Mapping Position Encoding(GMPE)method and refining the encoder-decoder framework.First,GMPE includes mapping the regions of objects to grids,calculating the relative distance among objects and quantization.Meanwhile,we also improve the Self-attention to adapt the GMPE.Then,we propose a Classes Semantic Quantization strategy to extract semantic information from the object classes,which is employed to facilitate embedding features and refining the encoder-decoder framework.To capture the interaction between multi-modal features,we propose Object Classes Awareness(OCA)to refine the encoder and decoder,namely OCAE and OCAD,respectively.Finally,we apply GMPE,OCAE and OCAD to form various combinations and to complete the entire PCAT.We utilize the MSCOCO dataset to evaluate the performance of our method.The results demonstrate that PCAT outperforms the other competitive methods.

Bidirectional Transformer with absolute-position aware relative position encoding for encoding sentences

Transformers have been widely studied in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, which can capture the dependency from the whole sentence with a high parallelizability thanks to the multi-head attention and the position-wise feed-forward network. However, the above two components of transformers are position-independent, which causes transformers to be weak in modeling sentence structures. Existing studies commonly utilized positional encoding or mask strategies for capturing the structural information of sentences. In this paper, we aim at strengthening the ability of transformers on modeling the linear structure of sentences from three aspects, containing the absolute position of tokens, the relative distance, and the direction between tokens. We propose a novel bidirectional Transformer with absolute-position aware relative position encoding (BiAR-Transformer) that combines the positional encoding and the mask strategy together. We model the relative distance between tokens along with the absolute position of tokens by a novel absolute-position aware relative position encoding. Meanwhile, we apply a bidirectional mask strategy for modeling the direction between tokens. Experimental results on the natural language inference, paraphrase identification, sentiment classification and machine translation tasks show that BiAR-Transformer achieves superior performance than other strong baselines.