XGPT: Cross-modal Generative Pre-Training for Image Captioning

In this paper, we propose XGPT, a new method of Cross-modal Generative Pre-Training for Image Captioning that is designed to pre-train text-to-image caption generators through four novel generation tasks, including Adversarial Image Captioning (AIC), Image-conditioned Masked Language Modeling (IMLM), Image-conditioned Denoising Autoencoding (IDA), and Text-conditioned Image Feature Generation (TIFG). As a result, the pre-trained XGPT can obtain new state-of-the-art results on the benchmark datasets, including COCO Captions and Flickr30k Captions. We also use XGPT to generate image captions as data augmentation for the image retrieval task and achieve significant improvement on all recall metrics.