  As a technically challenging topic, visual storytelling aims at generating an
imaginary and coherent story with narrative multi-sentences from a group of
relevant images. Existing methods often generate direct and rigid descriptions
of apparent image-based contents, because they are not capable of exploring
implicit information beyond images. Hence, these schemes could not capture
consistent dependencies from holistic representation, impairing the generation
of reasonable and fluent story. To address these problems, a novel
knowledge-enriched attention network with group-wise semantic model is
proposed. Three main novel components are designed and supported by substantial
experiments to reveal practical advantages. First, a knowledge-enriched
attention network is designed to extract implicit concepts from external
knowledge system, and these concepts are followed by a cascade cross-modal
attention mechanism to characterize imaginative and concrete representations.
Second, a group-wise semantic module with second-order pooling is developed to
explore the globally consistent guidance. Third, a unified one-stage story
generation model with encoder-decoder structure is proposed to simultaneously
train and infer the knowledge-enriched attention network, group-wise semantic
module and multi-modal story generation decoder in an end-to-end fashion.
Substantial experiments on the popular Visual Storytelling dataset with both
objective and subjective evaluation metrics demonstrate the superior
performance of the proposed scheme as compared with other state-of-the-art
methods.
