X-Linear Attention Networks for Image Captioning

Recent progress on fine-grained visual recognition and visual question answering has featured Bilinear Pooling, which effectively models the 2nd order interactions across multi-modal inputs. Nevertheless, there has not been evidence in support of building such interactions concurrently with attention mechanism for image captioning. In this paper, we introduce a unified attention block - X-Linear attention block, that fully employs bilinear pooling to selectively capitalize on visual information or perform multi-modal reasoning. Technically, X-Linear attention block simultaneously exploits both the spatial and channel-wise bilinear attention distributions to capture the 2 nd order interactions between the input…