  The topic diversity of open-domain videos leads to various vocabularies and
linguistic expressions in describing video contents, and therefore, makes the
video captioning task even more challenging. In this paper, we propose an
unified caption framework, M&M TGM, which mines multimodal topics in
unsupervised fashion from data and guides the caption decoder with these
topics. Compared to pre-defined topics, the mined multimodal topics are more
semantically and visually coherent and can reflect the topic distribution of
videos better. We formulate the topic-aware caption generation as a multi-task
learning problem, in which we add a parallel task, topic prediction, in
addition to the caption task. For the topic prediction task, we use the mined
topics as the teacher to train a student topic prediction model, which learns
to predict the latent topics from multimodal contents of videos. The topic
prediction provides intermediate supervision to the learning process. As for
the caption task, we propose a novel topic-aware decoder to generate more
accurate and detailed video descriptions with the guidance from latent topics.
The entire learning procedure is end-to-end and it optimizes both tasks
simultaneously. The results from extensive experiments conducted on the MSR-VTT
and Youtube2Text datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
M&M TGM not only outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on multiple
evaluation metrics and on both benchmark datasets, but also achieves better
generalization ability.
