Top-down visual attention mechanisms have been used extensively in image captioning and visual question answering (VQA) to enable deeper image understanding through fine-grained analysis and even multiple steps of reasoning. In this work, we propose a combined bottom-up and topdown attention mechanism that enables attention to be calculated at the level of objects and other salient image regions. This is the natural basis for attention to be considered. Within our approach, the bottom-up mechanism (based on Faster R-CNN) proposes image regions, each with an associated feature vector, while the top-down mechanism determines feature weightings. Applying this approach to image captioning, our results on the MSCOCO test server establish a new state-of-the-art for the task, achieving CIDEr / SPICE / BLEU-4 scores of 117.9, 21.5 and 36.9, respectively. Demonstrating the broad applicability of the method, applying the same approach to VQA we obtain first place in the 2017 VQA Challenge.

We propose a hierarchical attention network for document classification. Our model has two distinctive characteristics: (i) it has a hierarchical structure that mirrors the hierarchical structure of documents; (ii) it has two levels of attention mechanisms applied at the wordand sentence-level, enabling it to attend differentially to more and less important content when constructing the document representation. Experiments conducted on six large scale text classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperform previous methods by a substantial margin. Visualization of the attention layers illustrates that the model selects qualitatively informative words and sentences.

In this paper, we propose an Attentional Generative Adversarial Network (AttnGAN) that allows attention-driven, multi-stage refinement for fine-grained text-to-image generation. With a novel attentional generative network, the At-tnGAN can synthesize fine-grained details at different subregions of the image by paying attentions to the relevant words in the natural language description. In addition, a deep attentional multimodal similarity model is proposed to compute a fine-grained image-text matching loss for training the generator. The proposed AttnGAN significantly outperforms the previous state of the art, boosting the best reported inception score by 14.14% on the CUB dataset and 170.25% on the more challenging COCO dataset. A detailed analysis is also performed by visualizing the attention layers of the AttnGAN. It for the first time shows that the layered attentional GAN is able to automatically select the condition at the word level for generating different parts of the image.

Latent semantic models, such as LSA, intend to map a query to its relevant documents at the semantic level where keyword-based matching often fails. In this study we strive to develop a series of new latent semantic models with a deep structure that project queries and documents into a common low-dimensional space where the relevance of a document given a query is readily computed as the distance between them. The proposed deep structured semantic models are discriminatively trained by maximizing the conditional likelihood of the clicked documents given a query using the clickthrough data. To make our models applicable to large-scale Web search applications, we also use a technique called word hashing, which is shown to effectively scale up our semantic models to handle large vocabularies which are common in such tasks. The new models are evaluated on a Web document ranking task using a real-world data set. Results show that our best model significantly outperforms other latent semantic models, which were considered state-of-the-art in the performance prior to the work presented in this paper.

In this paper, we design a benchmark task and provide the associated datasets for recognizing face images and link them to corresponding entity keys in a knowledge base. More specifically, we propose a benchmark task to recognize one million celebrities from their face images, by using all the possibly collected face images of this individual on the web as training data. The rich information provided by the knowledge base helps to conduct disambiguation and improve the recognition accuracy, and contributes to various real-world applications, such as image captioning and news video analysis. Associated with this task, we design and provide concrete measurement set, evaluation protocol, as well as training data. We also present in details our experiment setup and report promising baseline results. Our benchmark task could lead to one of the largest classification problems in computer vision. To the best of our knowledge, our training dataset, which contains 10M images in version 1, is the largest publicly available one in the world.