IFCap: Image-like Retrieval and Frequency-based Entity Filtering for Zero-shot Captioning

Soeun Lee, Si-Woo Kim, Taewhan Kim, Dong-Jin Kim


Abstract
Recent advancements in image captioning have explored text-only training methods to overcome the limitations of paired image-text data. However, existing text-only training methods often overlook the modality gap between using text data during training and employing images during inference. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Image-like Retrieval, which aligns text features with visually relevant features to mitigate the modality gap. Our method further enhances the accuracy of generated captions by designing a fusion module that integrates retrieved captions with input features. Additionally, we introduce a Frequency-based Entity Filtering technique that significantly improves caption quality. We integrate these methods into a unified framework, which we refer to as IFCap (**I**mage-like Retrieval and **F**requency-based Entity Filtering for Zero-shot **Cap**tioning). Through extensive experimentation, our straightforward yet powerful approach has demonstrated its efficacy, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin in both image captioning and video captioning compared to zero-shot captioning based on text-only training.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1153
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
20715–20727
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1153
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Soeun Lee, Si-Woo Kim, Taewhan Kim, and Dong-Jin Kim. 2024. IFCap: Image-like Retrieval and Frequency-based Entity Filtering for Zero-shot Captioning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 20715–20727, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
IFCap: Image-like Retrieval and Frequency-based Entity Filtering for Zero-shot Captioning (Lee et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1153.pdf