Visual and semantic saliency are important in image captioning. However, single-phase image captioning benefits little from limited saliency without a saliency predictor. In this paper, a novel saliency-enhanced re-captioning framework via two-phase learning is proposed to enhance the single-phase image captioning. In the framework, visual saliency and semantic saliency are distilled from the first-phase model and fused with the second-phase model for model self-boosting. The visual saliency mechanism can generate a saliency map and a saliency mask for an image without learning a saliency map predictor. The semantic saliency mechanism sheds some lights on the properties of words with part-of-speech Noun in a caption. Besides, another type of saliency, sample saliency is proposed to explicitly compute the saliency degree of each sample, which helps for more robust image captioning. In addition, how to combine the above three types of saliency for further performance boost is also examined. Our framework can treat an image captioning model as a saliency extractor, which may benefit other captioning models and related tasks. The experimental results on both the Flickr30k and MSCOCO datasets show that the saliency-enhanced models can obtain promising performance gains.

Prediction of electricity consumption plays critical roles in the economy. Accurate electricity consumption forecasting is essential for policy makers to formulate electricity supply policies. However, limited data and variables generally cannot provide sufficient information to gain satisfactory prediction accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a novel improved grey forecasting model, which combines data transformation for the original data sequence and combination interpolation optimization of the background value of the GM(1,1) model, and is therefore named DCOGM(1,1). To evaluate the simulation and prediction performance of DCOGM(1,1), two case studies are carried out. In addition, the results show that DCOGM(1,1) outperforms most existing improved grey models in terms of forecasting accuracy. Finally, DCOGM(1,1) is employed to predict the total electricity consumption of Shanghai City in China from 2017 to 2021. In addition, the results suggest that DCOGM(1,1) performs well compared with the traditional GM(1,1) model and other grey modification models in this context and Shanghai’s electricity consumption will increase stably in the following five years. In summary, DCOGM(1,1) proposed in our study has competent exploration and exploitation ability, and could be utilized as an effective and promising tool for short-term planning for other forecasting issues with limited source data as well.

Recent neural models for video captioning usually employ an attention-based encoder-decoder framework. However, current approaches mainly attend to the motion features and object features of the video when generating the caption, but ignore the potential but useful historical information. Besides, exposure bias and vanishing gradients problems always exist in current caption generation models. In this paper, we propose a novel video captioning framework, named Stacked Multimodal Attention Network (SMAN). It adopts additional visual and textual historical information during caption generation as context features, employs a stacked architecture to process different features gradually, and utilizes the Reinforcement Learning method and coarse-to-fine training strategy to further improve the generated results. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments on the benchmark datasets of MSVD and MSR-VTT show the effectiveness and feasibility of our framework. The codes are available on https://github.com/zhengyi123456/SMAN .

This paper studies a hot-rolling batch scheduling problem, which is a challenging problem commonly arising in the iron-steel industry. This problem deals with forming steel strips into rolling units and determining the rolling sequences while minimizing changes in characteristics (e.g., width, thickness and rigidity) of all neighbor steel strips and maximizing the machine utilization. Based on technical rules used in iron-steel production practice, we formulate this problem as a prize collecting vehicle routing problem, which is a hard combinatorial multi-objective optimization problem. We develop a new heuristic approach to solve this problem by enhancing the framework of particle swarm optimization (PSO). The key features of our approach are the utilization of number mapping function, which allows the PSO algorithm to deal with discrete problems, and the employment of tabu search at the end of every PSO iteration. We investigate and measure the performance of the proposed approach using three real life datasets obtained from a well-known iron-steel production company in China. The results suggest that our approach is very efficient and effective in providing high-quality and practical solutions, and our approach outperforms traditional PSO and tabu search algorithms based on these datasets.