  It is well believed that video captioning is a fundamental but challenging
task in both computer vision and artificial intelligence fields. The prevalent
approach is to map an input video to a variable-length output sentence in a
sequence to sequence manner via Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Nevertheless,
the training of RNN still suffers to some degree from vanishing/exploding
gradient problem, making the optimization difficult. Moreover, the inherently
recurrent dependency in RNN prevents parallelization within a sequence during
training and therefore limits the computations. In this paper, we present a
novel design --- Temporal Deformable Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Networks
(dubbed as TDConvED) that fully employ convolutions in both encoder and decoder
networks for video captioning. Technically, we exploit convolutional block
structures that compute intermediate states of a fixed number of inputs and
stack several blocks to capture long-term relationships. The structure in
encoder is further equipped with temporal deformable convolution to enable
free-form deformation of temporal sampling. Our model also capitalizes on
temporal attention mechanism for sentence generation. Extensive experiments are
conducted on both MSVD and MSR-VTT video captioning datasets, and superior
results are reported when comparing to conventional RNN-based encoder-decoder
techniques. More remarkably, TDConvED increases CIDEr-D performance from 58.8%
to 67.2% on MSVD.
