You are provided with the abstract of a scientific paper and the abstracts of the papers it references. Your task is to write a Related Work section for the main paper. This section should concisely summarize and integrate the key points from the cited abstracts, reflecting how they relate to the main paper's contributions and context. In your summary, use numerical citation markers like [1], [2], etc., to refer to the corresponding papers.

Main Abstract:
Despite being virtually ubiquitous, sequence-to-sequence models are challenged by their lack of diversity and inability to be externally controlled. In this paper, we speculate that a fundamental shortcoming of sequence generation models is that the decoding is done strictly from left-to-right, meaning that outputs values generated earlier have a profound effect on those generated later. To address this issue, we propose a novel middle-out decoder architecture that begins from an initial middle-word and simultaneously expands the sequence in both directions. To facilitate information flow and maintain consistent decoding, we introduce a dual self-attention mechanism that allows us to model complex dependencies between the outputs. We illustrate the performance of our model on the task of video captioning, as well as a synthetic sequence de-noising task. Our middle-out decoder achieves significant improvements on de-noising and competitive performance in the task of video captioning, while quantifiably improving the caption diversity. Furthermore, we perform a qualitative analysis that demonstrates our ability to effectively control the generation process of our decoder.

Cited Abstract(s):
[1]: Despite the substantial progress in recent years, the image captioning techniques are still far from being perfect.Sentences produced by existing methods, e.g. those based on RNNs, are often overly rigid and lacking in variability. This issue is related to a learning principle widely used in practice, that is, to maximize the likelihood of training samples. This principle encourages high resemblance to the "ground-truth" captions while suppressing other reasonable descriptions. Conventional evaluation metrics, e.g. BLEU and METEOR, also favor such restrictive methods. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach, with the aim to improve the naturalness and diversity -- two essential properties of human expression. Specifically, we propose a new framework based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGAN), which jointly learns a generator to produce descriptions conditioned on images and an evaluator to assess how well a description fits the visual content. It is noteworthy that training a sequence generator is nontrivial. We overcome the difficulty by Policy Gradient, a strategy stemming from Reinforcement Learning, which allows the generator to receive early feedback along the way. We tested our method on two large datasets, where it performed competitively against real people in our user study and outperformed other methods on various tasks.

[2]: Generally speaking, different persons tend to describe images from various aspects due to their individually subjective perception. As a result, generating the appropriate descriptions of images with both diversity and high quality is of great importance. In this paper, we propose a framework called GroupTalk to learn multiple image caption distributions simultaneously and effectively mimic the diversity of the image captions written by human beings. In particular, a novel iterative update strategy is proposed to separate training sentence samples into groups and learn their distributions at the same time. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient classifier to solve the problem brought about by the non-linear and discontinuous nature of language distributions which will impair performance. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that GroupTalk naturally diversifies the generated captions of each image without sacrificing the accuracy.
Diversified Decoding: There has been some exploration into diverse language generation, particularly for the task of image captioning. [1] uses a Conditional GAN, along with a policy gradient, to generate diverse captions. [2] presents GroupTalk, a framework which simultaneously learns multiple image caption distributions, to mimic human diversity.