Cross-domain personalized image captioning

Image captioning aims to translate an image to a complete and natural sentence. It involves both computer vision and natural language processing. Though image captioning has achieved good results under the rapid development of deep neural networks, excessively pursuing the evaluation results of the captioning models makes the generated text description too conservative in practical applications. It is necessary to increase the diversity of the text description and account for prior knowledge such as the user’s favorite vocabularies and writing styles. In this paper, we study the personalized image captioning which can generate sentences to describe the user’s own story and feelings of life with the most preferred word expression. Moreover, we propose cross-domain personalized image captioning (CDPIC) to learn domain-invariant captioning models which can be applied on different social media platforms. The proposed method can flexibly model user interest by embedding the user ID as an interest vector. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first cross-domain personalized image captioning approach by combining the user interest modeling and a simple and effective domain-invariant constraint. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on datasets from the Instagram and Lookbook platforms.