Current work on multimodal machine translation (MMT) has suggested that the visual modality is either unnecessary or only marginally beneficial. We posit that this is a consequence of the very simple, short and repetitive sentences used in the only available dataset for the task (Multi30K), rendering the source text sufficient as context. In the general case, however, we believe that it is possible to combine visual and textual information in order to ground translations. In this paper we probe the contribution of the visual modality to state-of-the-art MMT models by conducting a systematic analysis where we partially deprive the models from source-side textual context. Our results show that under limited textual context, models are capable of leveraging the visual input to generate better translations. This contradicts the current belief that MMT models disregard the visual modality because of either the quality of the image features or the way they are integrated into the model.

Previous work on multimodal machine translation has shown that visual information is only needed in very specific cases, for example in the presence of ambiguous words where the textual context is not sufficient. As a consequence, models tend to learn to ignore this information. We propose a translate-and-refine approach to this problem where images are only used by a second stage decoder. This approach is trained jointly to generate a good first draft translation and to improve over this draft by (i) making better use of the target language textual context (both left and right-side contexts) and (ii) making use of visual context. This approach leads to the state of the art results. Additionally, we show that it has the ability to recover from erroneous or missing words in the source language.

In this paper, we focus on quantifying model stability as a function of random seed by investigating the effects of the induced randomness on model performance and the robustness of the model in general. We specifically perform a controlled study on the effect of random seeds on the behaviour of attention, gradientbased and surrogate model based (LIME) interpretations. Our analysis suggests that random seeds can adversely affect the consistency of models resulting in counterfactual interpretations. We propose a technique called Aggressive Stochastic Weight Averaging (ASWA) and an extension called Norm-filtered Aggressive Stochastic Weight Averaging (NASWA) which improves the stability of models over random seeds. With our ASWA and NASWA based optimization, we are able to improve the robustness of the original model, on average reducing the standard deviation of the model's performance by 72%.

The use of explicit object detectors as an intermediate step to image captioning -which used to constitute an essential stage in early work -is often bypassed in the currently dominant end-to-end approaches, where the language model is conditioned directly on a midlevel image embedding. We argue that explicit detections provide rich semantic information, and can thus be used as an interpretable representation to better understand why end-to-end image captioning systems work well. We provide an in-depth analysis of end-to-end image captioning by exploring a variety of cues that can be derived from such object detections. Our study reveals that end-to-end image captioning systems rely on matching image representations to generate captions, and that encoding the frequency, size and position of objects are complementary and all play a role in forming a good image representation. It also reveals that different object categories contribute in different ways towards image captioning.

No abstract

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) aims to translate a continuous input text stream into another language with the lowest latency and highest quality possible. The translation thus has to start with an incomplete source text, which is read progressively, creating the need for anticipation. In this paper, we seek to understand whether the addition of visual information can compensate for the missing source context. To this end, we analyse the impact of different multimodal approaches and visual features on state-of-the-art SiMT frameworks. Our results show that visual context is helpful and that visually-grounded models based on explicit object region information are much better than commonly used global features, reaching up to 3 BLEU points improvement under low latency scenarios. Our qualitative analysis illustrates cases where only the multimodal systems are able to translate correctly from English into gender-marked languages, as well as deal with differences in word order, such as adjective-noun placement between English and French.

Automatic evaluation of language generation systems is a well-studied problem in Natural Language Processing. While novel metrics are proposed every year, a few popular metrics remain as the de facto metrics to evaluate tasks such as image captioning and machine translation, despite their known limitations. This is partly due to ease of use, and partly because researchers expect to see them and know how to interpret them. In this paper, we urge the community for more careful consideration of how they automatically evaluate their models by demonstrating important failure cases on multiple datasets, language pairs and tasks. Our experiments show that metrics (i) usually prefer system outputs to human-authored texts, (ii) can be insensitive to correct translations of rare words, (iii) can yield surprisingly high scores when given a single sentence as system output for the entire test set.

Recurrent neural network language models (RNNLMs) can be augmented with auxiliary features, which can provide an extra modality on top of the words. It has been found that RNNLMs perform best when trained on a large corpus of generic text and then fine-tuned on text corresponding to the sub-domain for which it is to be applied. However, in many cases the auxiliary features are available for the sub-domain text but not for the generic text. In such cases, semi-supervised techniques can be used to infer such features for the generic text data such that the RNNLM can be trained and then fine-tuned on the available in-domain data with corresponding auxiliary features.In this paper, several novel approaches are investigated for dealing with the semi-supervised adaptation of RNNLMs with auxiliary features as input. These approaches include: using zero features during training to mask the weights of the feature sub-network; adding the feature sub-network only at the time of fine-tuning; deriving the features using a parametric model and; back-propagating to infer the features on the generic text. These approaches are investigated and results are reported both in terms of PPL and WER on a multi-genre broadcast ASR task.