  Existing image captioning models do not generalize well to out-of-domain
images containing novel scenes or objects. This limitation severely hinders the
use of these models in real world applications dealing with images in the wild.
We address this problem using a flexible approach that enables existing deep
captioning architectures to take advantage of image taggers at test time,
without re-training. Our method uses constrained beam search to force the
inclusion of selected tag words in the output, and fixed, pretrained word
embeddings to facilitate vocabulary expansion to previously unseen tag words.
Using this approach we achieve state of the art results for out-of-domain
captioning on MSCOCO (and improved results for in-domain captioning). Perhaps
surprisingly, our results significantly outperform approaches that incorporate
the same tag predictions into the learning algorithm. We also show that we can
significantly improve the quality of generated ImageNet captions by leveraging
ground-truth labels.
