Putting Humans in the Image Captioning Loop

Image Captioning (IC) models can highly benefit from human feedback in the training process, especially in cases where data is limited. We present work-in-progress on adapting an IC system to integrate human feedback, with the goal to make it easily adaptable to user-specific data. Our approach builds on a base IC model pre-trained on the MS COCO dataset, which generates captions for unseen images. The user will then be able to offer feedback on the image and the generated/predicted caption, which will be augmented to create additional training instances for the adaptation of the model. The additional instances are integrated into the model using step-wise updates, and a sparse memory replay component is used to avoid catastrophic forgetting. We hope that this approach, while leading to improved results, will also result in customizable IC models.