Research Area:  Machine Learning
Previous work on multimodal machine translation (MMT) has focused on the way of incorporating vision features into translation but little attention is on the quality of vision models. In this work, we investigate the impact of vision models on MMT. Given the fact that Transformer is becoming popular in computer vision, we experiment with various strong models (such as Vision Transformer) and enhanced features (such as object-detection and image captioning). We develop a selective attention model to study the patch-level contribution of an image in MMT. On detailed probing tasks, we find that stronger vision models are helpful for learning translation from the visual modality. Our results also suggest the need of carefully examining MMT models, especially when current benchmarks are small-scale and biased.
Keywords:  
Vision Features
Multimodal Machine Translation
Image captioning
Machine Learning
Author(s) Name:  Bei Li, Chuanhao Lv, Zefan Zhou, Tao Zhou, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, JingBo Zhu
Journal name:  Computation and Language
Conferrence name:  
Publisher name:  arXiv:2203.09173
DOI:  10.48550/arXiv.2203.09173
Volume Information:  
Paper Link:   https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.09173