# A sequential guiding network with attention for image captioning Source: [A sequential guiding network with attention for image captioning]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-27T05:56:48.640Z Authors: Daouda Sow, Zengchang Qin, Mouhamed Niasse, Tao Wan Published: 2018-11-01T05:03:26.000Z ## Abstract The recent advances of deep learning in both computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) provide us a new way of understanding semantics, by which we can deal with more challenging tasks such as automatic description generation from natural images. In this challenge, the encoder-decoder framework has achieved promising performance when a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used as image encoder and a recurrent neural network (RNN) as decoder. In this paper, we introduce a sequential guiding network that guides the decoder during word generation. The new model is an extension of the encoder-decoder framework with attention that has an additional guiding long short-term memory (LSTM) and can be trained in an end-to-end manner by using image/descriptions pairs. We validate our approach by conducting extensive experiments on a benchmark dataset, i.e., MS COCO Captions. The proposed model achieves significant improvement comparing to the other state-of-the-art deep learning models. ## 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]() [PDF]()