  Image captioning has focused on generalizing to images drawn from the same
distribution as the training set, and not to the more challenging problem of
generalizing to different distributions of images. Recently, Nikolaus et al.
(2019) introduced a dataset to assess compositional generalization in image
captioning, where models are evaluated on their ability to describe images with
unseen adjective-noun and noun-verb compositions. In this work, we investigate
different methods to improve compositional generalization by planning the
syntactic structure of a caption. Our experiments show that jointly modeling
tokens and syntactic tags enhances generalization in both RNN- and
Transformer-based models, while also improving performance on standard metrics.
