arXiv Machine Learning

Controllable Image Captioning with Prompt-Conditioned Scene Rewards

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

A Glance Is All You Need: Single-Pass Fine-Grained Image Captioning with SimLoss

arXiv:2609.00591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An image may be worth a thousand words, but most captioning models describe it in only a few. Modern vision-language models produce fluent high-level c...

By Suryaansh Jain, Rahasya Barkur, Vishal G, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Jack Wang, Koustava Goswami, Nedim Lipka, Puneet Mathur, Samyadeep Basu, Seunghyun Yoon
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 5

DEPICT: Scoring Text-to-Image Alignment by Answer Agreement

DEPICT is a new training‑free metric for evaluating text‑to‑image alignment. It replaces fixed reference answers with an agreement rule that compares image‑based and caption‑only responses, weighting questions by how decisively the caption determines them. By merging this agreement score with a holistic score, DEPICT improves negation accuracy dramatically and outperforms existing training‑free metrics while matching or exceeding fine‑tuned evaluators on several benchmarks.

By Vasco Ramos, Sandra Godinho Silva, Joao Magalhaes, Ricardo Rei, Pedro Henrique Martins
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

PANORAMA: Panoptic Grounded Captioning via Mask Proposal Selection

PANORAMA introduces a new panoptic grounded captioning framework that jointly generates detailed image captions and associates each phrase with precise pixel-level masks. The authors create PanoCaps, a human‑annotated benchmark with dense captions and near‑complete pixel coverage, and propose a phrase‑mask matching protocol with a generalized Panoptic Quality metric. PANORAMA conditions a pretrained segmenter on contextualized phrase representations, learns to select appropriate masks, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art grounding performance on PanoCaps and other pixel‑level tasks.

By Sara Pieri, Evangelos Kazakos, Shizhe Chen, Josef Sivic, Cordelia Schmid
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 23

ProCap: Prominence-guided Object Rectification for Faithful and Comprehensive Video Captioning

Improving video captioning quality typically demands retraining large vision-language models, an expensive and often impractical requirement. Existing training-free alternatives instead ground captions in detected objects to curb hallucination, but apply only a single, fixed correction pass without prioritizing which objects matter most, leaving semantically significant content omitted.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

SVG-Score: Human-Aligned Evaluation of Text-to-SVG Generation

SVG-Score introduces a human‑aligned evaluation framework for text‑to‑SVG generation, addressing the shortcomings of existing image‑based metrics like CLIPScore that poorly capture SVG‑specific errors such as color, count, and spatial inaccuracies. The authors first demonstrate that CLIP‑based scores are largely insensitive to these errors and that generic Vision‑Language Models respond inconsistently across error types and styles. They then present a human‑annotated Semantic Alignment dataset and develop two complementary evaluators: a CLIP‑based scorer adapted to vector graphics and a VLM judge refined through supervised fine‑tuning and reward‑shaped reinforcement learning, enabling both fast large‑scale and expressive, interpretable assessment of SVG generators.

By Marco Cipriano, Leonardo Zini, Alexandra Schild, Valentin Teutschbein, Afsana Mimi, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Gerard de Melo
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Re$^3$Cap: Retrieval-Guided Refinement for Image Captioning Enhancement via Reinforcement Learning

Re$^3$Cap introduces a retrieval‑guided refinement strategy for image captioning that leverages multi‑modal retrieval as a reasoning signal. The method, built on a Caption Refinement Suggester and a Caption Quality Assessor, detects hallucinations and omissions to produce more accurate and detailed captions without extra annotations. Experiments show it surpasses supervised fine‑tuning and improves relation reasoning by 8.64% on the COCO‑LN500 benchmark.

By Haonan Jia, Shichao Dong, Zenghui Sun, Jiawen Zheng, Ziqi Miao, Gege Shi, Qiuyu Zhao, Jinsong Lan, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

SVG-Score: Human-Aligned Evaluation of Text-to-SVG Generation

SVG-Score introduces a human‑aligned evaluation framework for text‑to‑SVG generation, addressing the inadequacies of existing image‑based metrics like CLIPScore that poorly capture SVG‑specific errors such as color, count, and spatial inaccuracies. The authors first demonstrate that CLIP‑based scores are largely insensitive to these errors and that off‑the‑shelf Vision‑Language Models respond unevenly across error types and styles. They then create a human‑annotated Semantic Alignment dataset and develop two evaluators: a CLIP scorer adapted to vector graphics and a VLM judge trained with supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning, enabling both fast large‑scale and expressive, interpretable assessment of SVG generators.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

CS-CLIP: Compositional Scene Graph-guided CLIP for Robust Compositional Reasoning

CS-CLIP is a vision‑language model that improves compositional reasoning by using scene graphs to identify compositional elements and create structured negative examples through selective masking. The approach retains only the most contradictory negatives, encouraging the model to depend on compositional structure instead of surface cues. CS-CLIP achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on compositional reasoning benchmarks while maintaining strong cross‑modal retrieval and downstream visual reasoning capabilities with fewer training samples.

By SeongJun Jeong, Minjoon Jung, Woo Suk Choi, Youwon Jang, Byoung-Tak Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Focus Where It Counts: A Salience-Driven Vision-Language Model for Low Vision Assistance

The paper introduces Salience-LLaVA, a vision‑language model that prioritizes scene elements based on their importance for low‑vision users. It presents three new salience‑aware datasets—Salience COCO, Salience Flickr, and Salience VizWiz—annotated with object‑level salience verified by low‑vision participants. The authors also propose the SCMI metric to evaluate caption ordering accuracy and demonstrate the system’s practicality by deploying it on assistive glasses.

By Jiazhao Liang, Hao Huang, Shuaihang Yuan, Congcong Wen, Geeta Chandra Raju Bethala, Giles Hamilton-Fletcher, Yu Hao, John-Ross Rizzo, Mengyu Wang, Anthony Tzes, Yi Fang