# Image Captioning based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Source: [Image Captioning based on Deep Reinforcement Learning](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa64de1e209131cea06e11>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T21:12:58.577Z

Authors: Haichao Shi, Peng Li, Bo Wang, Zhenyu Wang

Published: 2018-09-13T08:40:21.000Z

## Abstract

Recently it has shown that the policy-gradient methods for reinforcement learning have been utilized to train deep end-to-end systems on natural language processing tasks. What's more, with the complexity of understanding image content and diverse ways of describing image content in natural language, image captioning has been a challenging problem to deal with. To the best of our knowledge, most state-of-the-art methods follow a pattern of sequential model, such as recurrent neural networks (RNN). However, in this paper, we propose a novel architecture for image captioning with deep reinforcement learning to optimize image captioning tasks. We utilize two networks called "policy network" and "value network" to collaboratively generate the captions of images. The experiments are conducted on Microsoft COCO dataset, and the experimental results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04835>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.04835.pdf>)
