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Distinctive Image Captioning: Leveraging Ground Truth Captions in CLIP Guided Reinforcement Learning

Training image captioning models using teacher forcing results in very generic samples, whereas more distinctive captions can be very useful in retrieval applications or to produce alternative texts describing images for accessibility. Reinforcement Learning (RL) allows to use cross-modal retrieval similarity score between the generated caption and the input image as reward to guide the training, leading to more distinctive captions. Recent studies show that pre-trained cross-modal retrieval models can be used to provide this reward, completely eliminating the need for reference captions. However, we argue in this paper that Ground Truth (GT) captions can still be useful in this RL framework. We propose a new image captioning model training strategy that makes use of GT captions in different ways. Firstly, they can be used to train a simple MLP discriminator that serves as a regularization to prevent reward hacking and ensures the fluency of generated captions, resulting in a textual GAN setup extended for multimodal inputs. Secondly, they can serve as additional trajectories in the RL strategy, resulting in a teacher forcing loss weighted by the similarity of the GT to the image. This objective acts as an additional learning signal grounded to the distribution of the GT captions. Thirdly, they can serve as strong baselines when added to the pool of captions used to compute the proposed contrastive reward to reduce the variance of gradient estimate. Experiments on MS-COCO demonstrate the interest of the proposed training strategy to produce highly distinctive captions while maintaining high writing quality.

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