  Attention mechanisms have recently been introduced in deep learning for
various tasks in natural language processing and computer vision. But despite
their popularity, the "correctness" of the implicitly-learned attention maps
has only been assessed qualitatively by visualization of several examples. In
this paper we focus on evaluating and improving the correctness of attention in
neural image captioning models. Specifically, we propose a quantitative
evaluation metric for the consistency between the generated attention maps and
human annotations, using recently released datasets with alignment between
regions in images and entities in captions. We then propose novel models with
different levels of explicit supervision for learning attention maps during
training. The supervision can be strong when alignment between regions and
caption entities are available, or weak when only object segments and
categories are provided. We show on the popular Flickr30k and COCO datasets
that introducing supervision of attention maps during training solidly improves
both attention correctness and caption quality, showing the promise of making
machine perception more human-like.
