Daily Papers

We present a novel multimodal preference dataset for creative tasks, consisting of over 250 million human ratings on more than 2.2 million captions, collected through crowdsourcing rating data for The New Yorker's weekly cartoon caption contest over the past eight years. This unique dataset supports the development and evaluation of multimodal large language models and preference-based fine-tuning algorithms for humorous caption generation. We propose novel benchmarks for judging the quality of model-generated captions, utilizing both GPT4 and human judgments to establish ranking-based evaluation strategies. Our experimental results highlight the limitations of current fine-tuning methods, such as RLHF and DPO, when applied to creative tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models like GPT4 and Claude currently underperform top human contestants in generating humorous captions. As we conclude this extensive data collection effort, we release the entire preference dataset to the research community, fostering further advancements in AI humor generation and evaluation.

This paper presents OxfordTVG-HIC (Humorous Image Captions), a large-scale dataset for humour generation and understanding. Humour is an abstract, subjective, and context-dependent cognitive construct involving several cognitive factors, making it a challenging task to generate and interpret. Hence, humour generation and understanding can serve as a new task for evaluating the ability of deep-learning methods to process abstract and subjective information. Due to the scarcity of data, humour-related generation tasks such as captioning remain under-explored. To address this gap, OxfordTVG-HIC offers approximately 2.9M image-text pairs with humour scores to train a generalizable humour captioning model. Contrary to existing captioning datasets, OxfordTVG-HIC features a wide range of emotional and semantic diversity resulting in out-of-context examples that are particularly conducive to generating humour. Moreover, OxfordTVG-HIC is curated devoid of offensive content. We also show how OxfordTVG-HIC can be leveraged for evaluating the humour of a generated text. Through explainability analysis of the trained models, we identify the visual and linguistic cues influential for evoking humour prediction (and generation). We observe qualitatively that these cues are aligned with the benign violation theory of humour in cognitive psychology.

We introduce a novel meme generation system, which given any image can produce a humorous and relevant caption. Furthermore, the system can be conditioned on not only an image but also a user-defined label relating to the meme template, giving a handle to the user on meme content. The system uses a pretrained Inception-v3 network to return an image embedding which is passed to an attention-based deep-layer LSTM model producing the caption - inspired by the widely recognised Show and Tell Model. We implement a modified beam search to encourage diversity in the captions. We evaluate the quality of our model using perplexity and human assessment on both the quality of memes generated and whether they can be differentiated from real ones. Our model produces original memes that cannot on the whole be differentiated from real ones.

Detecting if a text is humorous is a hard task to do computationally, as it usually requires linguistic and common sense insights. In machine learning, humor detection is usually modeled as a binary classification task, trained to predict if the given text is a joke or another type of text. Rather than using completely different non-humorous texts, we propose using text generation algorithms for imitating the original joke dataset to increase the difficulty for the learning algorithm. We constructed several different joke and non-joke datasets to test the humor detection abilities of different language technologies. In particular, we compare the humor detection capabilities of classic neural network approaches with the state-of-the-art Dutch language model RobBERT. In doing so, we create and compare the first Dutch humor detection systems. We found that while other language models perform well when the non-jokes came from completely different domains, RobBERT was the only one that was able to distinguish jokes from generated negative examples. This performance illustrates the usefulness of using text generation to create negative datasets for humor recognition, and also shows that transformer models are a large step forward in humor detection.

We challenge AI models to "demonstrate understanding" of the sophisticated multimodal humor of The New Yorker Caption Contest. Concretely, we develop three carefully circumscribed tasks for which it suffices (but is not necessary) to grasp potentially complex and unexpected relationships between image and caption, and similarly complex and unexpected allusions to the wide varieties of human experience; these are the hallmarks of a New Yorker-caliber cartoon. We investigate vision-and-language models that take as input the cartoon pixels and caption directly, as well as language-only models for which we circumvent image-processing by providing textual descriptions of the image. Even with the rich multifaceted annotations we provide for the cartoon images, we identify performance gaps between high-quality machine learning models (e.g., a fine-tuned, 175B parameter language model) and humans. We publicly release our corpora including annotations describing the image's locations/entities, what's unusual about the scene, and an explanation of the joke.

Humor generation is a challenging task in natural language processing due to limited resources and the quality of existing datasets. Available humor language resources often suffer from toxicity and duplication, limiting their effectiveness for training robust models. This paper proposes CleanComedy, a specialized, partially annotated toxicity-filtered corpus of English and Russian jokes collected from various sources. We study the effectiveness of our data filtering approach through a survey on humor and toxicity levels in various joke groups. In addition, we study advances in computer humor generation by comparing jokes written by humans with various groups of generative jokes, including our baseline models trained on the CleanComedy datasets.

Metaphor and humor share a lot of common ground, and metaphor is one of the most common humorous mechanisms. This study focuses on the humorous capacity of multimodal metaphors, which has not received due attention in the community. We take inspiration from the Incongruity Theory of humor, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and the annotation scheme behind the VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus, and developed a novel annotation scheme for humorous multimodal metaphor use in image-caption pairs. We create the Hummus Dataset of Humorous Multimodal Metaphor Use, providing expert annotation on 1k image-caption pairs sampled from the New Yorker Caption Contest corpus. Using the dataset, we test state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their ability to detect and understand humorous multimodal metaphor use. Our experiments show that current MLLMs still struggle with processing humorous multimodal metaphors, particularly with regard to integrating visual and textual information. We release our dataset and code at github.com/xiaoyuisrain/humorous-multimodal-metaphor-use.

Jokes are intentionally written to be funny, but not all jokes are created the same. Some jokes may be fit for a classroom of kindergarteners, but others are best reserved for a more mature audience. While recent work has shown impressive results on humor detection in text, here we instead investigate the more nuanced task of detecting humor subtypes, especially of the less innocent variety. To that end, we introduce a novel jokes dataset filtered from Reddit and solve the subtype classification task using a finetuned Transformer dubbed the Naughtyformer. Moreover, we show that our model is significantly better at detecting offensiveness in jokes compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Image captioning aims to describe visual content in natural language. As 'a picture is worth a thousand words', there could be various correct descriptions for an image. However, with maximum likelihood estimation as the training objective, the captioning model is penalized whenever its prediction mismatches with the label. For instance, when the model predicts a word expressing richer semantics than the label, it will be penalized and optimized to prefer more concise expressions, referred to as conciseness optimization. In contrast, predictions that are more concise than labels lead to richness optimization. Such conflicting optimization directions could eventually result in the model generating general descriptions. In this work, we introduce Semipermeable MaxImum Likelihood Estimation (SMILE), which allows richness optimization while blocking conciseness optimization, thus encouraging the model to generate longer captions with more details. Extensive experiments on two mainstream image captioning datasets MSCOCO and Flickr30K demonstrate that SMILE significantly enhances the descriptiveness of generated captions. We further provide in-depth investigations to facilitate a better understanding of how SMILE works.

We introduce, release, and analyze a new dataset, called Humicroedit, for research in computational humor. Our publicly available data consists of regular English news headlines paired with versions of the same headlines that contain simple replacement edits designed to make them funny. We carefully curated crowdsourced editors to create funny headlines and judges to score a to a total of 15,095 edited headlines, with five judges per headline. The simple edits, usually just a single word replacement, mean we can apply straightforward analysis techniques to determine what makes our edited headlines humorous. We show how the data support classic theories of humor, such as incongruity, superiority, and setup/punchline. Finally, we develop baseline classifiers that can predict whether or not an edited headline is funny, which is a first step toward automatically generating humorous headlines as an approach to creating topical humor.

Multimodal punchlines, which involve humor or sarcasm conveyed in image-caption pairs, are a popular way of communication on online multimedia platforms. With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), it is essential to assess their ability to effectively comprehend these punchlines. However, existing benchmarks on punchline comprehension suffer from three major limitations: 1) language shortcuts that allow models to solely rely on text, 2) lack of question diversity, and 3) narrow focus on a specific domain of multimodal content (e.g., cartoon). To address these limitations, we introduce a multimodal Punchline comprehension Benchmark, named PunchBench, which is tailored for accurate and comprehensive evaluation of punchline comprehension. To enhance the evaluation accuracy, we generate synonymous and antonymous captions by modifying original captions, which mitigates the impact of shortcuts in the captions. To provide a comprehensive evaluation, PunchBench incorporates diverse question formats and image-captions from various domains. On this basis, we conduct extensive evaluations and reveal a significant gap between state-of-the-art MLLMs and humans in punchline comprehension. To improve punchline comprehension, we propose Simple-to-Complex Chain-of-Question (SC-CoQ) strategy, enabling the models to incrementally address complicated questions by first mastering simple ones. SC-CoQ effectively enhances the performance of various MLLMs on PunchBench, surpassing in-context learning and chain-of-thought.

Scientific figure captioning is a complex task that requires generating contextually appropriate descriptions of visual content. However, existing methods often fall short by utilizing incomplete information, treating the task solely as either an image-to-text or text summarization problem. This limitation hinders the generation of high-quality captions that fully capture the necessary details. Moreover, existing data sourced from arXiv papers contain low-quality captions, posing significant challenges for training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce a framework called Multi-LLM Collaborative Figure Caption Generation (MLBCAP) to address these challenges by leveraging specialized LLMs for distinct sub-tasks. Our approach unfolds in three key modules: (Quality Assessment) We utilize multimodal LLMs to assess the quality of training data, enabling the filtration of low-quality captions. (Diverse Caption Generation) We then employ a strategy of fine-tuning/prompting multiple LLMs on the captioning task to generate candidate captions. (Judgment) Lastly, we prompt a prominent LLM to select the highest quality caption from the candidates, followed by refining any remaining inaccuracies. Human evaluations demonstrate that informative captions produced by our approach rank better than human-written captions, highlighting its effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/teamreboott/MLBCAP

Textual humor is enormously diverse and computational studies need to account for this range, including intentionally bad humor. In this paper, we curate and analyze a novel corpus of sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest to better understand "bad" humor in English. Standard humor detection models perform poorly on our corpus, and an analysis of literary devices finds that these sentences combine features common in existing humor datasets (e.g., puns, irony) with metaphor, metafiction and simile. LLMs prompted to synthesize contest-style sentences imitate the form but exaggerate the effect by over-using certain literary devices, and including far more novel adjective-noun bigrams than human writers. Data, code and analysis are available at https://github.com/venkatasg/bulwer-lytton

Dark humor in online memes poses unique challenges due to its reliance on implicit, sensitive, and culturally contextual cues. To address the lack of resources and methods for detecting dark humor in multimodal content, we introduce a novel dataset of 4,379 Reddit memes annotated for dark humor, target category (gender, mental health, violence, race, disability, and other), and a three-level intensity rating (mild, moderate, severe). Building on this resource, we propose a reasoning-augmented framework that first generates structured explanations for each meme using a Large Vision-Language Model (VLM). Through a Role-Reversal Self-Loop, VLM adopts the author's perspective to iteratively refine its explanations, ensuring completeness and alignment. We then extract textual features from both the OCR transcript and the self-refined reasoning via a text encoder, while visual features are obtained using a vision transformer. A Tri-stream Cross-Reasoning Network (TCRNet) fuses these three streams, text, image, and reasoning, via pairwise attention mechanisms, producing a unified representation for classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong baselines across three tasks: dark humor detection, target identification, and intensity prediction. The dataset, annotations, and code are released to facilitate further research in multimodal humor understanding and content moderation. Code and Dataset are available at: https://github.com/Sai-Kartheek-Reddy/D-Humor-Dark-Humor-Understanding-via-Multimodal-Open-ended-Reasoning

While humor has been historically studied from a psychological, cognitive and linguistic standpoint, its study from a computational perspective is an area yet to be explored in Computational Linguistics. There exist some previous works, but a characterization of humor that allows its automatic recognition and generation is far from being specified. In this work we build a crowdsourced corpus of labeled tweets, annotated according to its humor value, letting the annotators subjectively decide which are humorous. A humor classifier for Spanish tweets is assembled based on supervised learning, reaching a precision of 84% and a recall of 69%.

Image captioning is conventionally formulated as the task of generating captions for images that match the distribution of reference image-caption pairs. However, reference captions in standard captioning datasets are short and may not uniquely identify the images they describe. These problems are further exacerbated when models are trained directly on image-alt text pairs collected from the internet. In this work, we show that it is possible to generate more specific captions with minimal changes to the training process. We implement classifier-free guidance for an autoregressive captioning model by fine-tuning it to estimate both conditional and unconditional distributions over captions. The guidance scale applied at decoding controls a trade-off between maximizing p(caption|image) and p(image|caption). Compared to standard greedy decoding, decoding with a guidance scale of 2 substantially improves reference-free metrics such as CLIPScore (0.808 vs. 0.775) and captiontoimage retrieval performance in the CLIP embedding space (recall@1 44.6% vs. 26.5%), but worsens standard reference-based captioning metrics (e.g., CIDEr 78.6 vs 126.1). We further explore the use of language models to guide the decoding process, obtaining small improvements over the Pareto frontier of reference-free vs. reference-based captioning metrics that arises from classifier-free guidance, and substantially improving the quality of captions generated from a model trained only on minimally curated web data.

Despite significant advancements in image segmentation and object detection, understanding complex scenes remains a significant challenge. Here, we focus on graphical humor as a paradigmatic example of image interpretation that requires elucidating the interaction of different scene elements in the context of prior cognitive knowledge. This paper introduces HumorDB, a novel, controlled, and carefully curated dataset designed to evaluate and advance visual humor understanding by AI systems. The dataset comprises diverse images spanning photos, cartoons, sketches, and AI-generated content, including minimally contrastive pairs where subtle edits differentiate between humorous and non-humorous versions. We evaluate humans, state-of-the-art vision models, and large vision-language models on three tasks: binary humor classification, funniness rating prediction, and pairwise humor comparison. The results reveal a gap between current AI systems and human-level humor understanding. While pretrained vision-language models perform better than vision-only models, they still struggle with abstract sketches and subtle humor cues. Analysis of attention maps shows that even when models correctly classify humorous images, they often fail to focus on the precise regions that make the image funny. Preliminary mechanistic interpretability studies and evaluation of model explanations provide initial insights into how different architectures process humor. Our results identify promising trends and current limitations, suggesting that an effective understanding of visual humor requires sophisticated architectures capable of detecting subtle contextual features and bridging the gap between visual perception and abstract reasoning. All the code and data are available here: https://github.com/kreimanlab/HumorDB{https://github.com/kreimanlab/HumorDB}

AI models capable of comprehending humor hold real-world promise -- for example, enhancing engagement in human-machine interactions. To gauge and diagnose the capacity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for humor understanding, we introduce v-HUB, a novel visual-centric video humor understanding benchmark. v-HUB comprises a curated collection of minimally verbal short videos, sourced from classic silent films and online resources, and reflecting real-world scenarios where humor can be appreciated purely through visual cues. Each video clip is paired with rich annotations, including captions, descriptions, and explanations, supporting evaluation tasks like caption matching and humor explanation. To broaden its applicability, we further construct an open-ended video QA task, making it readily integrable into existing video understanding benchmarks. We evaluate a diverse set of MLLMs, from specialized Video-LLMs to versatile OmniLLMs that can process audio, covering both open-source and proprietary domains. The experimental results expose the difficulties MLLMs face in comprehending humor from visual cues alone. For example, all models exhibit a marked performance drop on caption matching when moving from text-based to video-based evaluation (without audio). Our findings also demonstrate that incorporating audio helps with video humor understanding, highlighting the informativeness of sound and the promise of integrating richer modalities for complex video understanding tasks.

We consider generation and comprehension of natural language referring expression for objects in an image. Unlike generic "image captioning" which lacks natural standard evaluation criteria, quality of a referring expression may be measured by the receiver's ability to correctly infer which object is being described. Following this intuition, we propose two approaches to utilize models trained for comprehension task to generate better expressions. First, we use a comprehension module trained on human-generated expressions, as a "critic" of referring expression generator. The comprehension module serves as a differentiable proxy of human evaluation, providing training signal to the generation module. Second, we use the comprehension module in a generate-and-rerank pipeline, which chooses from candidate expressions generated by a model according to their performance on the comprehension task. We show that both approaches lead to improved referring expression generation on multiple benchmark datasets.

We present aMUSEd, an open-source, lightweight masked image model (MIM) for text-to-image generation based on MUSE. With 10 percent of MUSE's parameters, aMUSEd is focused on fast image generation. We believe MIM is under-explored compared to latent diffusion, the prevailing approach for text-to-image generation. Compared to latent diffusion, MIM requires fewer inference steps and is more interpretable. Additionally, MIM can be fine-tuned to learn additional styles with only a single image. We hope to encourage further exploration of MIM by demonstrating its effectiveness on large-scale text-to-image generation and releasing reproducible training code. We also release checkpoints for two models which directly produce images at 256x256 and 512x512 resolutions.

Figurative language generation is the task of reformulating a given text in the desired figure of speech while still being faithful to the original context. We take the first step towards multi-figurative language modelling by providing a benchmark for the automatic generation of five common figurative forms in English. We train mFLAG employing a scheme for multi-figurative language pre-training on top of BART, and a mechanism for injecting the target figurative information into the encoder; this enables the generation of text with the target figurative form from another figurative form without parallel figurative-figurative sentence pairs. Our approach outperforms all strong baselines. We also offer some qualitative analysis and reflections on the relationship between the different figures of speech.

Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation (MuSE) is a new yet challenging task, which aims to generate a natural language sentence for a multimodal social post (an image as well as its caption) to explain why it contains sarcasm. Although the existing pioneer study has achieved great success with the BART backbone, it overlooks the gap between the visual feature space and the decoder semantic space, the object-level metadata of the image, as well as the potential external knowledge. To solve these limitations, in this work, we propose a novel mulTi-source sEmantic grAph-based Multimodal sarcasm explanation scheme, named TEAM. In particular, TEAM extracts the object-level semantic meta-data instead of the traditional global visual features from the input image. Meanwhile, TEAM resorts to ConceptNet to obtain the external related knowledge concepts for the input text and the extracted object meta-data. Thereafter, TEAM introduces a multi-source semantic graph that comprehensively characterize the multi-source (i.e., caption, object meta-data, external knowledge) semantic relations to facilitate the sarcasm reasoning. Extensive experiments on a public released dataset MORE verify the superiority of our model over cutting-edge methods.

Speech-driven animation has gained significant traction in recent years, with current methods achieving near-photorealistic results. However, the field remains underexplored regarding non-verbal communication despite evidence demonstrating its importance in human interaction. In particular, generating laughter sequences presents a unique challenge due to the intricacy and nuances of this behaviour. This paper aims to bridge this gap by proposing a novel model capable of generating realistic laughter sequences, given a still portrait and an audio clip containing laughter. We highlight the failure cases of traditional facial animation methods and leverage recent advances in diffusion models to produce convincing laughter videos. We train our model on a diverse set of laughter datasets and introduce an evaluation metric specifically designed for laughter. When compared with previous speech-driven approaches, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across all metrics, even when these are re-trained for laughter generation.

Training data is at the core of any successful text-to-image models. The quality and descriptiveness of image text are crucial to a model's performance. Given the noisiness and inconsistency in web-scraped datasets, recent works shifted towards synthetic training captions. While this setup is generally believed to produce more capable models, current literature does not provide any insights into its design choices. This study closes this gap by systematically investigating how different synthetic captioning strategies impact the downstream performance of text-to-image models. Our experiments demonstrate that dense, high-quality captions enhance text alignment but may introduce trade-offs in output aesthetics and diversity. Conversely, captions of randomized lengths yield balanced improvements across aesthetics and alignment without compromising sample diversity. We also demonstrate that varying caption distributions introduce significant shifts in the output bias of a trained model. Our findings underscore the importance of caption design in achieving optimal model performance and provide practical insights for more effective training data strategies in text-to-image generation.

Humor is prevalent in online communications and it often relies on more than one modality (e.g., cartoons and memes). Interpreting humor in multimodal settings requires drawing on diverse types of knowledge, including metaphorical, sociocultural, and commonsense knowledge. However, identifying the most useful knowledge remains an open question. We introduce , a method inspired by the information bottleneck principle that elicits relevant world knowledge from vision and language models which is iteratively refined for generating an explanation of the humor in an unsupervised manner. Our experiments on three datasets confirm the advantage of our method over a range of baselines. Our method can further be adapted in the future for additional tasks that can benefit from eliciting and conditioning on relevant world knowledge and open new research avenues in this direction.

Humor and Offense are highly subjective due to multiple word senses, cultural knowledge, and pragmatic competence. Hence, accurately detecting humorous and offensive texts has several compelling use cases in Recommendation Systems and Personalized Content Moderation. However, due to the lack of an extensive labeled dataset, most prior works in this domain haven't explored large neural models for subjective humor understanding. This paper explores whether large neural models and their ensembles can capture the intricacies associated with humor/offense detection and rating. Our experiments on the SemEval-2021 Task 7: HaHackathon show that we can develop reasonable humor and offense detection systems with such models. Our models are ranked third in subtask 1b and consistently ranked around the top 33% of the leaderboard for the remaining subtasks.

High-quality image captions play a crucial role in improving the performance of cross-modal applications such as text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, and text-image retrieval. To generate long-form, high-quality captions, many recent studies have employed multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current MLLMs often produce captions that lack fine-grained details or suffer from hallucinations, a challenge that persists in both open-source and closed-source models. Inspired by Feature-Integration theory, which suggests that attention must focus on specific regions to integrate visual information effectively, we propose a divide-then-aggregate strategy. Our method first divides the image into semantic and spatial patches to extract fine-grained details, enhancing the model's local perception of the image. These local details are then hierarchically aggregated to generate a comprehensive global description. To address hallucinations and inconsistencies in the generated captions, we apply a semantic-level filtering process during hierarchical aggregation. This training-free pipeline can be applied to both open-source models (LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-1.6, Mini-Gemini) and closed-source models (Claude-3.5-Sonnet, GPT-4o, GLM-4V-Plus). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates more detailed, reliable captions, advancing multimodal description generation without requiring model retraining. The source code are available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Patch-Matters

Humor plays a significant role in daily language communication. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), natural language processing has made significant strides in understanding and generating various genres of texts. However, most LLMs exhibit poor performance in generating and processing Chinese humor. In this study, we introduce a comprehensive Chinese humor-related dataset, the Chinese Fun Set (CFunSet). This dataset aggregates existing Chinese humor datasets and includes over 20,000 jokes collected from Tieba-JokeBar, a Chinese online platform known for joke sharing. The resulting corpus comprises more than 160,000 entries. Leveraging CFunSet, we developed the Chinese Fun Model (CFunModel), the first large language model designed to handle various Chinese humor-related tasks including Crosstalk Response Selection, Humor Recognition, Joke Generation, etc. Experimental results demonstrate that CFunModel outperforms popular large language models in these tasks. Our CFunSet is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ZhenghanYU/CFunSet and CFunModel is available at https://huggingface.co/ZhenghanYU/CFunModel. A demostration video of our work is available at https://youtu.be/MOsISOJ66Ms.

Automation of humor detection and rating has interesting use cases in modern technologies, such as humanoid robots, chatbots, and virtual assistants. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting and rating humor in short texts based on a popular linguistic theory of humor. The proposed technical method initiates by separating sentences of the given text and utilizing the BERT model to generate embeddings for each one. The embeddings are fed to separate lines of hidden layers in a neural network (one line for each sentence) to extract latent features. At last, the parallel lines are concatenated to determine the congruity and other relationships between the sentences and predict the target value. We accompany the paper with a novel dataset for humor detection consisting of 200,000 formal short texts. In addition to evaluating our work on the novel dataset, we participated in a live machine learning competition focused on rating humor in Spanish tweets. The proposed model obtained F1 scores of 0.982 and 0.869 in the humor detection experiments which outperform general and state-of-the-art models. The evaluation performed on two contrasting settings confirm the strength and robustness of the model and suggests two important factors in achieving high accuracy in the current task: 1) usage of sentence embeddings and 2) utilizing the linguistic structure of humor in designing the proposed model.

Large Vision-Language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities in tasks requiring a fine-grained understanding of literal images and text, such as visual question-answering or visual entailment. However, there has been little exploration of these models' capabilities when presented with images and captions containing figurative phenomena such as metaphors or humor, the meaning of which is often implicit. To close this gap, we propose a new task and a high-quality dataset: Visual Figurative Language Understanding with Textual Explanations (V-FLUTE). We frame the visual figurative language understanding problem as an explainable visual entailment task, where the model has to predict whether the image (premise) entails a claim (hypothesis) and justify the predicted label with a textual explanation. Using a human-AI collaboration framework, we build a high-quality dataset, V-FLUTE, that contains 6,027 <image, claim, label, explanation> instances spanning five diverse multimodal figurative phenomena: metaphors, similes, idioms, sarcasm, and humor. The figurative phenomena can be present either in the image, the caption, or both. We further conduct both automatic and human evaluations to assess current VLMs' capabilities in understanding figurative phenomena.

Recent advancements in large multimodal language models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across a wide range of tasks. Yet, these models still struggle with understanding the nuances of human humor through juxtaposition, particularly when it involves nonlinear narratives that underpin many jokes and humor cues. This paper investigates this challenge by focusing on comics with contradictory narratives, where each comic consists of two panels that create a humorous contradiction. We introduce the YesBut benchmark, which comprises tasks of varying difficulty aimed at assessing AI's capabilities in recognizing and interpreting these comics, ranging from literal content comprehension to deep narrative reasoning. Through extensive experimentation and analysis of recent commercial or open-sourced large (vision) language models, we assess their capability to comprehend the complex interplay of the narrative humor inherent in these comics. Our results show that even state-of-the-art models still lag behind human performance on this task. Our findings offer insights into the current limitations and potential improvements for AI in understanding human creative expressions.

Evaluating the quality of automatically generated image descriptions is challenging, requiring metrics that capture various aspects such as grammaticality, coverage, correctness, and truthfulness. While human evaluation offers valuable insights, its cost and time-consuming nature pose limitations. Existing automated metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR, and CIDEr aim to bridge this gap but often show weak correlations with human judgment. We address this challenge by introducing a novel evaluation framework rooted in a modern large language model (LLM), such as GPT-4 or Gemini, capable of image generation. In our proposed framework, we begin by feeding an input image into a designated image captioning model, chosen for evaluation, to generate a textual description. Using this description, an LLM then creates a new image. By extracting features from both the original and LLM-created images, we measure their similarity using a designated similarity metric. A high similarity score suggests that the image captioning model has accurately generated textual descriptions, while a low similarity score indicates discrepancies, revealing potential shortcomings in the model's performance. Human-annotated reference captions are not required in our proposed evaluation framework, which serves as a valuable tool for evaluating the effectiveness of image captioning models. Its efficacy is confirmed through human evaluation.

This report introduces a solution to the Topic 1 Zero-shot Image Captioning of 2024 NICE : New frontiers for zero-shot Image Captioning Evaluation. In contrast to NICE 2023 datasets, this challenge involves new annotations by humans with significant differences in caption style and content. Therefore, we enhance image captions effectively through retrieval augmentation and caption grading methods. At the data level, we utilize high-quality captions generated by image caption models as training data to address the gap in text styles. At the model level, we employ OFA (a large-scale visual-language pre-training model based on handcrafted templates) to perform the image captioning task. Subsequently, we propose caption-level strategy for the high-quality caption data generated by the image caption models and integrate them with retrieval augmentation strategy into the template to compel the model to generate higher quality, more matching, and semantically enriched captions based on the retrieval augmentation prompts. Our approach achieves a CIDEr score of 234.11.

Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models have demonstrated considerable success across various vision-language tasks, such as text-to-image retrieval, where the model is required to effectively process natural language input to produce an accurate visual output. However, current models still face limitations in dealing with linguistic variations in input queries, such as paraphrases, making it challenging to handle a broad range of user queries in real-world applications. In this study, we introduce a straightforward fine-tuning approach to enhance the representations of CLIP models for paraphrases. Our approach involves a two-step paraphrase generation process, where we automatically create two categories of paraphrases from web-scale image captions by leveraging large language models. Subsequently, we fine-tune the CLIP text encoder using these generated paraphrases while freezing the image encoder. Our resulting model, which we call ParaCLIP, exhibits significant improvements over baseline CLIP models across various tasks, including paraphrased retrieval (with rank similarity scores improved by up to 2.0% and 5.6%), Visual Genome Relation and Attribution, as well as seven semantic textual similarity tasks.

Understanding satire and humor is a challenging task for even current Vision-Language models. In this paper, we propose the challenging tasks of Satirical Image Detection (detecting whether an image is satirical), Understanding (generating the reason behind the image being satirical), and Completion (given one half of the image, selecting the other half from 2 given options, such that the complete image is satirical) and release a high-quality dataset YesBut, consisting of 2547 images, 1084 satirical and 1463 non-satirical, containing different artistic styles, to evaluate those tasks. Each satirical image in the dataset depicts a normal scenario, along with a conflicting scenario which is funny or ironic. Despite the success of current Vision-Language Models on multimodal tasks such as Visual QA and Image Captioning, our benchmarking experiments show that such models perform poorly on the proposed tasks on the YesBut Dataset in Zero-Shot Settings w.r.t both automated as well as human evaluation. Additionally, we release a dataset of 119 real, satirical photographs for further research. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/abhi1nandy2/yesbut_dataset.

Researchers use figures to communicate rich, complex information in scientific papers. The captions of these figures are critical to conveying effective messages. However, low-quality figure captions commonly occur in scientific articles and may decrease understanding. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural framework to automatically generate informative, high-quality captions for scientific figures. To this end, we introduce SCICAP, a large-scale figure-caption dataset based on computer science arXiv papers published between 2010 and 2020. After pre-processing - including figure-type classification, sub-figure identification, text normalization, and caption text selection - SCICAP contained more than two million figures extracted from over 290,000 papers. We then established baseline models that caption graph plots, the dominant (19.2%) figure type. The experimental results showed both opportunities and steep challenges of generating captions for scientific figures.

Modern image captioning models are usually trained with text similarity objectives. However, since reference captions in public datasets often describe the most salient common objects, models trained with text similarity objectives tend to ignore specific and detailed aspects of an image that distinguish it from others. Toward more descriptive and distinctive caption generation, we propose using CLIP, a multimodal encoder trained on huge image-text pairs from web, to calculate multimodal similarity and use it as a reward function. We also propose a simple finetuning strategy of the CLIP text encoder to improve grammar that does not require extra text annotation. This completely eliminates the need for reference captions during the reward computation. To comprehensively evaluate descriptive captions, we introduce FineCapEval, a new dataset for caption evaluation with fine-grained criteria: overall, background, object, relations. In our experiments on text-to-image retrieval and FineCapEval, the proposed CLIP-guided model generates more distinctive captions than the CIDEr-optimized model. We also show that our unsupervised grammar finetuning of the CLIP text encoder alleviates the degeneration problem of the naive CLIP reward. Lastly, we show human analysis where the annotators strongly prefer the CLIP reward to the CIDEr and MLE objectives according to various criteria. Code and Data: https://github.com/j-min/CLIP-Caption-Reward

Laughter is a unique expression, essential to affirmative social interactions of humans. Although current 3D talking head generation methods produce convincing verbal articulations, they often fail to capture the vitality and subtleties of laughter and smiles despite their importance in social context. In this paper, we introduce a novel task to generate 3D talking heads capable of both articulate speech and authentic laughter. Our newly curated dataset comprises 2D laughing videos paired with pseudo-annotated and human-validated 3D FLAME parameters and vertices. Given our proposed dataset, we present a strong baseline with a two-stage training scheme: the model first learns to talk and then acquires the ability to express laughter. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably compared to existing approaches in both talking head generation and expressing laughter signals. We further explore potential applications on top of our proposed method for rigging realistic avatars.

Novel object captioning (NOC) aims to describe images containing objects without observing their ground truth captions during training. Due to the absence of caption annotation, captioning models cannot be directly optimized via sequence-to-sequence training or CIDEr optimization. As a result, we present Paraphrasing-to-Captioning (P2C), a two-stage learning framework for NOC, which would heuristically optimize the output captions via paraphrasing. With P2C, the captioning model first learns paraphrasing from a language model pre-trained on text-only corpus, allowing expansion of the word bank for improving linguistic fluency. To further enforce the output caption sufficiently describing the visual content of the input image, we perform self-paraphrasing for the captioning model with fidelity and adequacy objectives introduced. Since no ground truth captions are available for novel object images during training, our P2C leverages cross-modality (image-text) association modules to ensure the above caption characteristics can be properly preserved. In the experiments, we not only show that our P2C achieves state-of-the-art performances on nocaps and COCO Caption datasets, we also verify the effectiveness and flexibility of our learning framework by replacing language and cross-modality association models for NOC. Implementation details and code are available in the supplementary materials.

One of the major challenges in training text-to-image generation models is the need of a large number of high-quality image-text pairs. While image samples are often easily accessible, the associated text descriptions typically require careful human captioning, which is particularly time- and cost-consuming. In this paper, we propose the first work to train text-to-image generation models without any text data. Our method leverages the well-aligned multi-modal semantic space of the powerful pre-trained CLIP model: the requirement of text-conditioning is seamlessly alleviated via generating text features from image features. Extensive experiments are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We obtain state-of-the-art results in the standard text-to-image generation tasks. Importantly, the proposed language-free model outperforms most existing models trained with full image-text pairs. Furthermore, our method can be applied in fine-tuning pre-trained models, which saves both training time and cost in training text-to-image generation models. Our pre-trained model obtains competitive results in zero-shot text-to-image generation on the MS-COCO dataset, yet with around only 1% of the model size and training data size relative to the recently proposed large DALL-E model.

Memes, combining text and images, frequently use metaphors to convey persuasive messages, shaping public opinion. Motivated by this, our team engaged in SemEval-2024 Task 4, a hierarchical multi-label classification task designed to identify rhetorical and psychological persuasion techniques embedded within memes. To tackle this problem, we introduced a caption generation step to assess the modality gap and the impact of additional semantic information from images, which improved our result. Our best model utilizes GPT-4 generated captions alongside meme text to fine-tune RoBERTa as the text encoder and CLIP as the image encoder. It outperforms the baseline by a large margin in all 12 subtasks. In particular, it ranked in top-3 across all languages in Subtask 2a, and top-4 in Subtask 2b, demonstrating quantitatively strong performance. The improvement achieved by the introduced intermediate step is likely attributable to the metaphorical essence of images that challenges visual encoders. This highlights the potential for improving abstract visual semantics encoding.

Laughter is one of the most expressive and natural aspects of human speech, conveying emotions, social cues, and humor. However, most text-to-speech (TTS) systems lack the ability to produce realistic and appropriate laughter sounds, limiting their applications and user experience. While there have been prior works to generate natural laughter, they fell short in terms of controlling the timing and variety of the laughter to be generated. In this work, we propose ELaTE, a zero-shot TTS that can generate natural laughing speech of any speaker based on a short audio prompt with precise control of laughter timing and expression. Specifically, ELaTE works on the audio prompt to mimic the voice characteristic, the text prompt to indicate the contents of the generated speech, and the input to control the laughter expression, which can be either the start and end times of laughter, or the additional audio prompt that contains laughter to be mimicked. We develop our model based on the foundation of conditional flow-matching-based zero-shot TTS, and fine-tune it with frame-level representation from a laughter detector as additional conditioning. With a simple scheme to mix small-scale laughter-conditioned data with large-scale pre-training data, we demonstrate that a pre-trained zero-shot TTS model can be readily fine-tuned to generate natural laughter with precise controllability, without losing any quality of the pre-trained zero-shot TTS model. Through the evaluations, we show that ELaTE can generate laughing speech with significantly higher quality and controllability compared to conventional models. See https://aka.ms/elate/ for demo samples.

The task of image captioning demands an algorithm to generate natural language descriptions of visual inputs. Recent advancements have seen a convergence between image captioning research and the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs -- like GPT-4V and Gemini -- which extend the capabilities of text-only LLMs to multiple modalities. This paper investigates whether Multimodal LLMs can supplant traditional image captioning networks by evaluating their performance on various image description benchmarks. We explore both the zero-shot capabilities of these models and their adaptability to different semantic domains through fine-tuning methods, including prompt learning, prefix tuning, and low-rank adaptation. Our results demonstrate that while Multimodal LLMs achieve impressive zero-shot performance, fine-tuning for specific domains while maintaining their generalization capabilities intact remains challenging. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research in image captioning and the development of more adaptable Multimodal LLMs.

In this work, we focus on improving the captions generated by image-caption generation systems. We propose a novel re-ranking approach that leverages visual-semantic measures to identify the ideal caption that maximally captures the visual information in the image. Our re-ranker utilizes the Belief Revision framework (Blok et al., 2003) to calibrate the original likelihood of the top-n captions by explicitly exploiting the semantic relatedness between the depicted caption and the visual context. Our experiments demonstrate the utility of our approach, where we observe that our re-ranker can enhance the performance of a typical image-captioning system without the necessity of any additional training or fine-tuning.

Computational Humor involves several tasks, such as humor recognition, humor generation, and humor scoring, for which it is useful to have human-curated data. In this work we present a corpus of 27,000 tweets written in Spanish and crowd-annotated by their humor value and funniness score, with about four annotations per tweet, tagged by 1,300 people over the Internet. It is equally divided between tweets coming from humorous and non-humorous accounts. The inter-annotator agreement Krippendorff's alpha value is 0.5710. The dataset is available for general use and can serve as a basis for humor detection and as a first step to tackle subjectivity.

The evaluation of machine-generated image captions is a complex and evolving challenge. With the advent of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), image captioning has become a core task, increasing the need for robust and reliable evaluation metrics. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of advancements in image captioning evaluation, analyzing the evolution, strengths, and limitations of existing metrics. We assess these metrics across multiple dimensions, including correlation with human judgment, ranking accuracy, and sensitivity to hallucinations. Additionally, we explore the challenges posed by the longer and more detailed captions generated by MLLMs and examine the adaptability of current metrics to these stylistic variations. Our analysis highlights some limitations of standard evaluation approaches and suggests promising directions for future research in image captioning assessment.

Recent advancements in multimodal models highlight the value of rewritten captions for improving performance, yet key challenges remain. For example, while synthetic captions often provide superior quality and image-text alignment, it is not clear whether they can fully replace AltTexts: the role of synthetic captions and their interaction with original web-crawled AltTexts in pre-training is still not well understood. Moreover, different multimodal foundation models may have unique preferences for specific caption formats, but efforts to identify the optimal captions for each model remain limited. In this work, we propose a novel, controllable, and scalable captioning pipeline designed to generate diverse caption formats tailored to various multimodal models. By examining Short Synthetic Captions (SSC) towards Dense Synthetic Captions (DSC+) as case studies, we systematically explore their effects and interactions with AltTexts across models such as CLIP, multimodal LLMs, and diffusion models. Our findings reveal that a hybrid approach that keeps both synthetic captions and AltTexts can outperform the use of synthetic captions alone, improving both alignment and performance, with each model demonstrating preferences for particular caption formats. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights into optimizing captioning strategies, thereby advancing the pre-training of multimodal foundation models.

Massive web datasets play a key role in the success of large vision-language models like CLIP and Flamingo. However, the raw web data is noisy, and existing filtering methods to reduce noise often come at the expense of data diversity. Our work focuses on caption quality as one major source of noise, and studies how generated captions can increase the utility of web-scraped datapoints with nondescript text. Through exploring different mixing strategies for raw and generated captions, we outperform the best filtering method proposed by the DataComp benchmark by 2% on ImageNet and 4% on average across 38 tasks, given a candidate pool of 128M image-text pairs. Our best approach is also 2x better at Flickr and MS-COCO retrieval. We then analyze what makes synthetic captions an effective source of text supervision. In experimenting with different image captioning models, we also demonstrate that the performance of a model on standard image captioning benchmarks (e.g., NoCaps CIDEr) is not a reliable indicator of the utility of the captions it generates for multimodal training. Finally, our experiments with using generated captions at DataComp's large scale (1.28B image-text pairs) offer insights into the limitations of synthetic text, as well as the importance of image curation with increasing training data quantity.

This paper presents the Deceptive Humor Dataset (DHD), a novel resource for studying humor derived from fabricated claims and misinformation. In an era of rampant misinformation, understanding how humor intertwines with deception is essential. DHD consists of humor-infused comments generated from false narratives, incorporating fabricated claims and manipulated information using the ChatGPT-4o model. Each instance is labeled with a Satire Level, ranging from 1 for subtle satire to 3 for high-level satire and classified into five distinct Humor Categories: Dark Humor, Irony, Social Commentary, Wordplay, and Absurdity. The dataset spans multiple languages including English, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and their code-mixed variants (Te-En, Hi-En, Ka-En, Ta-En), making it a valuable multilingual benchmark. By introducing DHD, we establish a structured foundation for analyzing humor in deceptive contexts, paving the way for a new research direction that explores how humor not only interacts with misinformation but also influences its perception and spread. We establish strong baselines for the proposed dataset, providing a foundation for future research to benchmark and advance deceptive humor detection models.

In this work, we present TextHarmony, a unified and versatile multimodal generative model proficient in comprehending and generating visual text. Simultaneously generating images and texts typically results in performance degradation due to the inherent inconsistency between vision and language modalities. To overcome this challenge, existing approaches resort to modality-specific data for supervised fine-tuning, necessitating distinct model instances. We propose Slide-LoRA, which dynamically aggregates modality-specific and modality-agnostic LoRA experts, partially decoupling the multimodal generation space. Slide-LoRA harmonizes the generation of vision and language within a singular model instance, thereby facilitating a more unified generative process. Additionally, we develop a high-quality image caption dataset, DetailedTextCaps-100K, synthesized with a sophisticated closed-source MLLM to enhance visual text generation capabilities further. Comprehensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Empowered by Slide-LoRA, TextHarmony achieves comparable performance to modality-specific fine-tuning results with only a 2% increase in parameters and shows an average improvement of 2.5% in visual text comprehension tasks and 4.0% in visual text generation tasks. Our work delineates the viability of an integrated approach to multimodal generation within the visual text domain, setting a foundation for subsequent inquiries.

This paper focuses on creating synthetic data to improve the quality of image captions. Existing works typically have two shortcomings. First, they caption images from scratch, ignoring existing alt-text metadata, and second, lack transparency if the captioners' training data (e.g. GPT) is unknown. In this paper, we study a principled approach Altogether based on the key idea to edit and re-align existing alt-texts associated with the images. To generate training data, we perform human annotation where annotators start with the existing alt-text and re-align it to the image content in multiple rounds, consequently constructing captions with rich visual concepts. This differs from prior work that carries out human annotation as a one-time description task solely based on images and annotator knowledge. We train a captioner on this data that generalizes the process of re-aligning alt-texts at scale. Our results show our Altogether approach leads to richer image captions that also improve text-to-image generation and zero-shot image classification tasks.

In recent years, automatic generation of image descriptions (captions), that is, image captioning, has attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, we particularly consider generating Japanese captions for images. Since most available caption datasets have been constructed for English language, there are few datasets for Japanese. To tackle this problem, we construct a large-scale Japanese image caption dataset based on images from MS-COCO, which is called STAIR Captions. STAIR Captions consists of 820,310 Japanese captions for 164,062 images. In the experiment, we show that a neural network trained using STAIR Captions can generate more natural and better Japanese captions, compared to those generated using English-Japanese machine translation after generating English captions.

Image captioning systems are unable to generate fine-grained captions as they are trained on data that is either noisy (alt-text) or generic (human annotations). This is further exacerbated by maximum likelihood training that encourages generation of frequently occurring phrases. Previous works have tried to address this limitation by fine-tuning captioners with a self-retrieval (SR) reward. However, we find that SR fine-tuning has a tendency to reduce caption faithfulness and even hallucinate. In this work, we circumvent this bottleneck by improving the MLE initialization of the captioning system and designing a curriculum for the SR fine-tuning process. To this extent, we present (1) Visual Caption Boosting, a novel framework to instill fine-grainedness in generic image captioning datasets while remaining anchored in human annotations; and (2) BagCurri, a carefully designed training curriculum that more optimally leverages the contrastive nature of the self-retrieval reward. Jointly, they enable the captioner to describe fine-grained aspects in the image while preserving faithfulness to ground-truth captions. Our approach outperforms previous work by +8.9% on SR against 99 random distractors (RD100) (Dessi et al., 2023); and +7.6% on ImageCoDe. Additionally, existing metrics to evaluate captioning systems fail to reward diversity or evaluate a model's fine-grained understanding ability. Our third contribution addresses this by proposing self-retrieval from the lens of evaluation. We introduce TrueMatch, a benchmark comprising bags of highly similar images that uses SR to assess the captioner's ability to capture subtle visual distinctions. We evaluate and compare several state-of-the-art open-source MLLMs on TrueMatch, and find that our SR approach outperforms them all by a significant margin (e.g. +4.8% - 7.1% over Cambrian) while having 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer parameters.

Recent text-to-image matching models apply contrastive learning to large corpora of uncurated pairs of images and sentences. While such models can provide a powerful score for matching and subsequent zero-shot tasks, they are not capable of generating caption given an image. In this work, we repurpose such models to generate a descriptive text given an image at inference time, without any further training or tuning steps. This is done by combining the visual-semantic model with a large language model, benefiting from the knowledge in both web-scale models. The resulting captions are much less restrictive than those obtained by supervised captioning methods. Moreover, as a zero-shot learning method, it is extremely flexible and we demonstrate its ability to perform image arithmetic in which the inputs can be either images or text, and the output is a sentence. This enables novel high-level vision capabilities such as comparing two images or solving visual analogy tests. Our code is available at: https://github.com/YoadTew/zero-shot-image-to-text.

In this paper we present the first model for directly synthesizing fluent, natural-sounding spoken audio captions for images that does not require natural language text as an intermediate representation or source of supervision. Instead, we connect the image captioning module and the speech synthesis module with a set of discrete, sub-word speech units that are discovered with a self-supervised visual grounding task. We conduct experiments on the Flickr8k spoken caption dataset in addition to a novel corpus of spoken audio captions collected for the popular MSCOCO dataset, demonstrating that our generated captions also capture diverse visual semantics of the images they describe. We investigate several different intermediate speech representations, and empirically find that the representation must satisfy several important properties to serve as drop-in replacements for text.

Existing work has observed that current text-to-image systems do not accurately reflect explicit spatial relations between objects such as 'left of' or 'below'. We hypothesize that this is because explicit spatial relations rarely appear in the image captions used to train these models. We propose an automatic method that, given existing images, generates synthetic captions that contain 14 explicit spatial relations. We introduce the Spatial Relation for Generation (SR4G) dataset, which contains 9.9 millions image-caption pairs for training, and more than 60 thousand captions for evaluation. In order to test generalization we also provide an 'unseen' split, where the set of objects in the train and test captions are disjoint. SR4G is the first dataset that can be used to spatially fine-tune text-to-image systems. We show that fine-tuning two different Stable Diffusion models (denoted as SD_{SR4G}) yields up to 9 points improvements in the VISOR metric. The improvement holds in the 'unseen' split, showing that SD_{SR4G} is able to generalize to unseen objects. SD_{SR4G} improves the state-of-the-art with fewer parameters, and avoids complex architectures. Our analysis shows that improvement is consistent for all relations. The dataset and the code will be publicly available.

This work investigates descriptive captions as an additional source of supervision for biological multimodal foundation models. Images and captions can be viewed as complementary samples from the latent morphospace of a species, each capturing certain biological traits. Incorporating captions during training encourages alignment with this shared latent structure, emphasizing potentially diagnostic characters while suppressing spurious correlations. The main challenge, however, lies in obtaining faithful, instance-specific captions at scale. This requirement has limited the utilization of natural language supervision in organismal biology compared with many other scientific domains. We complement this gap by generating synthetic captions with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), guided by Wikipedia-derived visual information and taxon-tailored format examples. These domain-specific contexts help reduce hallucination and yield accurate, instance-based descriptive captions. Using these captions, we train BIOCAP (i.e., BIOCLIP with Captions), a biological foundation model that captures rich semantics and achieves strong performance in species classification and text-image retrieval. These results demonstrate the value of descriptive captions beyond labels in bridging biological images with multimodal foundation models.

Image captioning is one of the straightforward tasks that can take advantage of large-scale web-crawled data which provides rich knowledge about the visual world for a captioning model. However, since web-crawled data contains image-text pairs that are aligned at different levels, the inherent noises (e.g., misaligned pairs) make it difficult to learn a precise captioning model. While the filtering strategy can effectively remove noisy data, however, it leads to a decrease in learnable knowledge and sometimes brings about a new problem of data deficiency. To take the best of both worlds, we propose a noise-aware learning framework, which learns rich knowledge from the whole web-crawled data while being less affected by the noises. This is achieved by the proposed quality controllable model, which is learned using alignment levels of the image-text pairs as an additional control signal during training. The alignment-conditioned training allows the model to generate high-quality captions of well-aligned by simply setting the control signal to desired alignment level at inference time. Through in-depth analysis, we show that our controllable captioning model is effective in handling noise. In addition, with two tasks of zero-shot captioning and text-to-image retrieval using generated captions (i.e., self-retrieval), we also demonstrate our model can produce high-quality captions in terms of descriptiveness and distinctiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/noc.

Zero-shot video captioning requires that a model generate high-quality captions without human-annotated video-text pairs for training. State-of-the-art approaches to the problem leverage CLIP to extract visual-relevant textual prompts to guide language models in generating captions. These methods tend to focus on one key aspect of the scene and build a caption that ignores the rest of the visual input. To address this issue, and generate more accurate and complete captions, we propose a novel progressive multi-granularity textual prompting strategy for zero-shot video captioning. Our approach constructs three distinct memory banks, encompassing noun phrases, scene graphs of noun phrases, and entire sentences. Moreover, we introduce a category-aware retrieval mechanism that models the distribution of natural language surrounding the specific topics in question. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with 5.7%, 16.2%, and 3.4% improvements in terms of the main metric CIDEr on MSR-VTT, MSVD, and VATEX benchmarks compared to existing state-of-the-art.

Despite the success of various text generation metrics such as BERTScore, it is still difficult to evaluate the image captions without enough reference captions due to the diversity of the descriptions. In this paper, we introduce a new metric UMIC, an Unreferenced Metric for Image Captioning which does not require reference captions to evaluate image captions. Based on Vision-and-Language BERT, we train UMIC to discriminate negative captions via contrastive learning. Also, we observe critical problems of the previous benchmark dataset (i.e., human annotations) on image captioning metric, and introduce a new collection of human annotations on the generated captions. We validate UMIC on four datasets, including our new dataset, and show that UMIC has a higher correlation than all previous metrics that require multiple references. We release the benchmark dataset and pre-trained models to compute the UMIC.

Sarcasm is a complex form of figurative language in which the intended meaning contradicts the literal one. Its prevalence in social media and popular culture poses persistent challenges for natural language understanding, sentiment analysis, and content moderation. With the emergence of multimodal large language models, sarcasm detection extends beyond text and requires integrating cues from audio and vision. We present MuSaG, the first German multimodal sarcasm detection dataset, consisting of 33 minutes of manually selected and human-annotated statements from German television shows. Each instance provides aligned text, audio, and video modalities, annotated separately by humans, enabling evaluation in unimodal and multimodal settings. We benchmark nine open-source and commercial models, spanning text, audio, vision, and multimodal architectures, and compare their performance to human annotations. Our results show that while humans rely heavily on audio in conversational settings, models perform best on text. This highlights a gap in current multimodal models and motivates the use of MuSaG for developing models better suited to realistic scenarios. We release MuSaG publicly to support future research on multimodal sarcasm detection and human-model alignment.

There is growing interest in systems that generate captions for scientific figures. However, assessing these systems output poses a significant challenge. Human evaluation requires academic expertise and is costly, while automatic evaluation depends on often low-quality author-written captions. This paper investigates using large language models (LLMs) as a cost-effective, reference-free method for evaluating figure captions. We first constructed SCICAP-EVAL, a human evaluation dataset that contains human judgments for 3,600 scientific figure captions, both original and machine-made, for 600 arXiv figures. We then prompted LLMs like GPT-4 and GPT-3 to score (1-6) each caption based on its potential to aid reader understanding, given relevant context such as figure-mentioning paragraphs. Results show that GPT-4, used as a zero-shot evaluator, outperformed all other models and even surpassed assessments made by Computer Science and Informatics undergraduates, achieving a Kendall correlation score of 0.401 with Ph.D. students rankings

Image captioning is a multimodal problem that has drawn extensive attention in both the natural language processing and computer vision community. In this paper, we present a novel image captioning architecture to better explore semantics available in captions and leverage that to enhance both image representation and caption generation. Our models first construct caption-guided visual relationship graphs that introduce beneficial inductive bias using weakly supervised multi-instance learning. The representation is then enhanced with neighbouring and contextual nodes with their textual and visual features. During generation, the model further incorporates visual relationships using multi-task learning for jointly predicting word and object/predicate tag sequences. We perform extensive experiments on the MSCOCO dataset, showing that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the baselines, resulting in the state-of-the-art performance under a wide range of evaluation metrics.

Sarcastic speech synthesis, which involves generating speech that effectively conveys sarcasm, is essential for enhancing natural interactions in applications such as entertainment and human-computer interaction. However, synthesizing sarcastic speech remains a challenge due to the nuanced prosody that characterizes sarcasm, as well as the limited availability of annotated sarcastic speech data. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel approach that integrates feedback loss from a bi-modal sarcasm detection model into the TTS training process, enhancing the model's ability to capture and convey sarcasm. In addition, by leveraging transfer learning, a speech synthesis model pre-trained on read speech undergoes a two-stage fine-tuning process. First, it is fine-tuned on a diverse dataset encompassing various speech styles, including sarcastic speech. In the second stage, the model is further refined using a dataset focused specifically on sarcastic speech, enhancing its ability to generate sarcasm-aware speech. Objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that our proposed methods improve the quality, naturalness, and sarcasm-awareness of synthesized speech.

When describing an image, reading text in the visual scene is crucial to understand the key information. Recent work explores the TextCaps task, i.e. image captioning with reading Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tokens, which requires models to read text and cover them in generated captions. Existing approaches fail to generate accurate descriptions because of their (1) poor reading ability; (2) inability to choose the crucial words among all extracted OCR tokens; (3) repetition of words in predicted captions. To this end, we propose a Confidence-aware Non-repetitive Multimodal Transformers (CNMT) to tackle the above challenges. Our CNMT consists of a reading, a reasoning and a generation modules, in which Reading Module employs better OCR systems to enhance text reading ability and a confidence embedding to select the most noteworthy tokens. To address the issue of word redundancy in captions, our Generation Module includes a repetition mask to avoid predicting repeated word in captions. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on TextCaps dataset, improving from 81.0 to 93.0 in CIDEr. Our source code is publicly available.

Research on generative models to produce human-aligned / human-preferred outputs has seen significant recent contributions. Between text and image-generative models, we narrowed our focus to text-based generative models, particularly to produce captions for images that align with human preferences. In this research, we explored a potential method to amplify the performance of the Deep Neural Network Model to generate captions that are preferred by humans. This was achieved by integrating Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) using the Flickr8k dataset. Also, a novel loss function that is capable of optimizing the model based on human feedback is introduced. In this paper, we provide a concise sketch of our approach and results, hoping to contribute to the ongoing advances in the field of human-aligned generative AI models.

Neural captioners are typically trained to mimic human-generated references without optimizing for any specific communication goal, leading to problems such as the generation of vague captions. In this paper, we show that fine-tuning an out-of-the-box neural captioner with a self-supervised discriminative communication objective helps to recover a plain, visually descriptive language that is more informative about image contents. Given a target image, the system must learn to produce a description that enables an out-of-the-box text-conditioned image retriever to identify such image among a set of candidates. We experiment with the popular ClipCap captioner, also replicating the main results with BLIP. In terms of similarity to ground-truth human descriptions, the captions emerging from discriminative finetuning lag slightly behind those generated by the non-finetuned model, when the latter is trained and tested on the same caption dataset. However, when the model is used without further tuning to generate captions for out-of-domain datasets, our discriminatively-finetuned captioner generates descriptions that resemble human references more than those produced by the same captioner without finetuning. We further show that, on the Conceptual Captions dataset, discriminatively finetuned captions are more helpful than either vanilla ClipCap captions or ground-truth captions for human annotators tasked with an image discrimination task.

We propose OmniCaptioner, a versatile visual captioning framework for generating fine-grained textual descriptions across a wide variety of visual domains. Unlike prior methods limited to specific image types (e.g., natural images or geometric visuals), our framework provides a unified solution for captioning natural images, visual text (e.g., posters, UIs, textbooks), and structured visuals (e.g., documents, tables, charts). By converting low-level pixel information into semantically rich textual representations, our framework bridges the gap between visual and textual modalities. Our results highlight three key advantages: (i) Enhanced Visual Reasoning with LLMs, where long-context captions of visual modalities empower LLMs, particularly the DeepSeek-R1 series, to reason effectively in multimodal scenarios; (ii) Improved Image Generation, where detailed captions improve tasks like text-to-image generation and image transformation; and (iii) Efficient Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which enables faster convergence with less data. We believe the versatility and adaptability of OmniCaptioner can offer a new perspective for bridging the gap between language and visual modalities.

Existing humor datasets and evaluations predominantly focus on English, lacking resources for culturally nuanced humor in non-English languages like Chinese. To address this gap, we construct Chumor, a dataset sourced from Ruo Zhi Ba (RZB), a Chinese Reddit-like platform dedicated to sharing intellectually challenging and culturally specific jokes. We annotate explanations for each joke and evaluate human explanations against two state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4o and ERNIE Bot, through A/B testing by native Chinese speakers. Our evaluation shows that Chumor is challenging even for SOTA LLMs, and the human explanations for Chumor jokes are significantly better than explanations generated by the LLMs.

In this paper we describe the Microsoft COCO Caption dataset and evaluation server. When completed, the dataset will contain over one and a half million captions describing over 330,000 images. For the training and validation images, five independent human generated captions will be provided. To ensure consistency in evaluation of automatic caption generation algorithms, an evaluation server is used. The evaluation server receives candidate captions and scores them using several popular metrics, including BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE and CIDEr. Instructions for using the evaluation server are provided.

Figure captions are crucial for helping readers understand and remember a figure's key message. Many models have been developed to generate these captions, helping authors compose better quality captions more easily. Yet, authors almost always need to revise generic AI-generated captions to match their writing style and the domain's style, highlighting the need for personalization. Despite language models' personalization (LaMP) advances, these technologies often focus on text-only settings and rarely address scenarios where both inputs and profiles are multimodal. This paper introduces LaMP-Cap, a dataset for personalized figure caption generation with multimodal figure profiles. For each target figure, LaMP-Cap provides not only the needed inputs, such as figure images, but also up to three other figures from the same document--each with its image, caption, and figure-mentioning paragraphs--as a profile to characterize the context. Experiments with four LLMs show that using profile information consistently helps generate captions closer to the original author-written ones. Ablation studies reveal that images in the profile are more helpful than figure-mentioning paragraphs, highlighting the advantage of using multimodal profiles over text-only ones.

Multimodal Sarcasm Understanding (MSU) has a wide range of applications in the news field such as public opinion analysis and forgery detection. However, existing MSU benchmarks and approaches usually focus on sentence-level MSU. In document-level news, sarcasm clues are sparse or small and are often concealed in long text. Moreover, compared to sentence-level comments like tweets, which mainly focus on only a few trends or hot topics (e.g., sports events), content in the news is considerably diverse. Models created for sentence-level MSU may fail to capture sarcasm clues in document-level news. To fill this gap, we present a comprehensive benchmark for Document-level Multimodal Sarcasm Understanding (DocMSU). Our dataset contains 102,588 pieces of news with text-image pairs, covering 9 diverse topics such as health, business, etc. The proposed large-scale and diverse DocMSU significantly facilitates the research of document-level MSU in real-world scenarios. To take on the new challenges posed by DocMSU, we introduce a fine-grained sarcasm comprehension method to properly align the pixel-level image features with word-level textual features in documents. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing that it can serve as a baseline approach to the challenging DocMSU. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Dulpy/DocMSU.

State-of-The-Art (SoTA) image captioning models often rely on the Microsoft COCO (MS-COCO) dataset for training. This dataset contains annotations provided by human annotators, who typically produce captions averaging around ten tokens. However, this constraint presents a challenge in effectively capturing complex scenes and conveying detailed information. Furthermore, captioning models tend to exhibit bias towards the ``average'' caption, which captures only the more general aspects. What would happen if we were able to automatically generate longer captions, thereby making them more detailed? Would these captions, evaluated by humans, be more or less representative of the image content compared to the original MS-COCO captions? In this paper, we present a novel approach to address previous challenges by showcasing how captions generated from different SoTA models can be effectively fused, resulting in richer captions. Our proposed method leverages existing models from the literature, eliminating the need for additional training. Instead, it utilizes an image-text based metric to rank the captions generated by SoTA models for a given image. Subsequently, the top two captions are fused using a Large Language Model (LLM). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, as the captions generated by our model exhibit higher consistency with human judgment when evaluated on the MS-COCO test set. By combining the strengths of various SoTA models, our method enhances the quality and appeal of image captions, bridging the gap between automated systems and the rich, informative nature of human-generated descriptions. This advance opens up new possibilities for generating captions that are more suitable for the training of both vision-language and captioning models.

Memes are a widely popular tool for web users to express their thoughts using visual metaphors. Understanding memes requires recognizing and interpreting visual metaphors with respect to the text inside or around the meme, often while employing background knowledge and reasoning abilities. We present the task of meme captioning and release a new dataset, MemeCap. Our dataset contains 6.3K memes along with the title of the post containing the meme, the meme captions, the literal image caption, and the visual metaphors. Despite the recent success of vision and language (VL) models on tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering, our extensive experiments using state-of-the-art VL models show that they still struggle with visual metaphors, and perform substantially worse than humans.

Current vision-language generative models rely on expansive corpora of paired image-text data to attain optimal performance and generalization capabilities. However, automatically collecting such data (e.g. via large-scale web scraping) leads to low quality and poor image-text correlation, while human annotation is more accurate but requires significant manual effort and expense. We introduce ITIT (InTegrating Image Text): an innovative training paradigm grounded in the concept of cycle consistency which allows vision-language training on unpaired image and text data. ITIT is comprised of a joint image-text encoder with disjoint image and text decoders that enable bidirectional image-to-text and text-to-image generation in a single framework. During training, ITIT leverages a small set of paired image-text data to ensure its output matches the input reasonably well in both directions. Simultaneously, the model is also trained on much larger datasets containing only images or texts. This is achieved by enforcing cycle consistency between the original unpaired samples and the cycle-generated counterparts. For instance, it generates a caption for a given input image and then uses the caption to create an output image, and enforces similarity between the input and output images. Our experiments show that ITIT with unpaired datasets exhibits similar scaling behavior as using high-quality paired data. We demonstrate image generation and captioning performance on par with state-of-the-art text-to-image and image-to-text models with orders of magnitude fewer (only 3M) paired image-text data.

Sarcasm Detection has enjoyed great interest from the research community, however the task of predicting sarcasm in a text remains an elusive problem for machines. Past studies mostly make use of twitter datasets collected using hashtag based supervision but such datasets are noisy in terms of labels and language. To overcome these shortcoming, we introduce a new dataset which contains news headlines from a sarcastic news website and a real news website. Next, we propose a hybrid Neural Network architecture with attention mechanism which provides insights about what actually makes sentences sarcastic. Through experiments, we show that the proposed model improves upon the baseline by ~ 5% in terms of classification accuracy.

Understanding humor-particularly when it involves complex, contradictory narratives that require comparative reasoning-remains a significant challenge for large vision-language models (VLMs). This limitation hinders AI's ability to engage in human-like reasoning and cultural expression. In this paper, we investigate this challenge through an in-depth analysis of comics that juxtapose panels to create humor through contradictions. We introduce the YesBut (V2), a novel benchmark with 1,262 comic images from diverse multilingual and multicultural contexts, featuring comprehensive annotations that capture various aspects of narrative understanding. Using this benchmark, we systematically evaluate a wide range of VLMs through four complementary tasks spanning from surface content comprehension to deep narrative reasoning, with particular emphasis on comparative reasoning between contradictory elements. Our extensive experiments reveal that even the most advanced models significantly underperform compared to humans, with common failures in visual perception, key element identification, comparative analysis and hallucinations. We further investigate text-based training strategies and social knowledge augmentation methods to enhance model performance. Our findings not only highlight critical weaknesses in VLMs' understanding of cultural and creative expressions but also provide pathways toward developing context-aware models capable of deeper narrative understanding though comparative reasoning.

We propose a method that can generate an unambiguous description (known as a referring expression) of a specific object or region in an image, and which can also comprehend or interpret such an expression to infer which object is being described. We show that our method outperforms previous methods that generate descriptions of objects without taking into account other potentially ambiguous objects in the scene. Our model is inspired by recent successes of deep learning methods for image captioning, but while image captioning is difficult to evaluate, our task allows for easy objective evaluation. We also present a new large-scale dataset for referring expressions, based on MS-COCO. We have released the dataset and a toolbox for visualization and evaluation, see https://github.com/mjhucla/Google_Refexp_toolbox

While recent years have seen rapid progress in image-conditioned text generation, image captioning still suffers from the fundamental issue of hallucinations, the generation of spurious details that cannot be inferred from the given image. Dedicated methods for reducing hallucinations in image captioning largely focus on closed-vocabulary object tokens, ignoring most types of hallucinations that occur in practice. In this work, we propose MOCHa, an approach that harnesses advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) to address the sequence-level nature of hallucinations in an open-world setup. To optimize for caption fidelity to the input image, we leverage ground-truth reference captions as proxies to measure the logical consistency of generated captions. However, optimizing for caption fidelity alone fails to preserve the semantic adequacy of generations; therefore, we propose a multi-objective reward function that jointly targets these qualities, without requiring any strong supervision. We demonstrate that these goals can be simultaneously optimized with our framework, enhancing performance for various captioning models of different scales. Our qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate MOCHa's superior performance across various established metrics. We also demonstrate the benefit of our method in the open-vocabulary setting. To this end, we contribute OpenCHAIR, a new benchmark for quantifying open-vocabulary hallucinations in image captioning models, constructed using generative foundation models. We will release our code, benchmark, and trained models.

Image captioning is a central task in computer vision which has experienced substantial progress following the advent of vision-language pre-training techniques. In this paper, we highlight a frequently overlooked limitation of captioning models that often fail to capture semantically significant elements. This drawback can be traced back to the text-image datasets; while their captions typically offer a general depiction of image content, they frequently omit salient details. To mitigate this limitation, we propose FuseCap - a novel method for enriching captions with additional visual information, obtained from vision experts, such as object detectors, attribute recognizers, and Optical Character Recognizers (OCR). Our approach fuses the outputs of such vision experts with the original caption using a large language model (LLM), yielding enriched captions that present a comprehensive image description. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed caption enrichment method through both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our method is then used to curate the training set of a captioning model based BLIP which surpasses current state-of-the-art approaches in generating accurate and detailed captions while using significantly fewer parameters and training data. As additional contributions, we provide a dataset comprising of 12M image-enriched caption pairs and show that the proposed method largely improves image-text retrieval.

Despite the recent advances of the artificial intelligence, building social intelligence remains a challenge. Among social signals, laughter is one of the distinctive expressions that occurs during social interactions between humans. In this work, we tackle a new challenge for machines to understand the rationale behind laughter in video, Video Laugh Reasoning. We introduce this new task to explain why people laugh in a particular video and a dataset for this task. Our proposed dataset, SMILE, comprises video clips and language descriptions of why people laugh. We propose a baseline by leveraging the reasoning capacity of large language models (LLMs) with textual video representation. Experiments show that our baseline can generate plausible explanations for laughter. We further investigate the scalability of our baseline by probing other video understanding tasks and in-the-wild videos. We release our dataset, code, and model checkpoints on https://github.com/SMILE-data/SMILE.

The vast area of subjectivity in Natural Language Processing (NLP) poses a challenge to the solutions typically used in generalized tasks. As exploration in the scope of generalized NLP is much more advanced, it implies the tremendous gap that is still to be addressed amongst all feasible tasks where an opinion, taste, or feelings are inherent, thus creating a need for a solution, where a data fusion could take place. We have chosen the task of funniness, as it heavily relies on the sense of humor, which is fundamentally subjective. Our experiments across five personalized and four generalized datasets involving several personalized deep neural architectures have shown that the task of humor detection greatly benefits from the inclusion of personalized data in the training process. We tested five scenarios of training data fusion that focused on either generalized (majority voting) or personalized approaches to humor detection. The best results were obtained for the setup, in which all available personalized datasets were joined to train the personalized reasoning model. It boosted the prediction performance by up to approximately 35% of the macro F1 score. Such a significant gain was observed for all five personalized test sets. At the same time, the impact of the model's architecture was much less than the personalization itself. It seems that concatenating personalized datasets, even with the cost of normalizing the range of annotations across all datasets, if combined with the personalized models, results in an enormous increase in the performance of humor detection.

Large datasets of paired images and text have become increasingly popular for learning generic representations for vision and vision-and-language tasks. Such datasets have been built by querying search engines or collecting HTML alt-text -- since web data is noisy, they require complex filtering pipelines to maintain quality. We explore alternate data sources to collect high quality data with minimal filtering. We introduce RedCaps -- a large-scale dataset of 12M image-text pairs collected from Reddit. Images and captions from Reddit depict and describe a wide variety of objects and scenes. We collect data from a manually curated set of subreddits, which give coarse image labels and allow us to steer the dataset composition without labeling individual instances. We show that captioning models trained on RedCaps produce rich and varied captions preferred by humans, and learn visual representations that transfer to many downstream tasks.

Previous works show that noisy, web-crawled image-text pairs may limit vision-language pretraining like CLIP and propose learning with synthetic captions as a promising alternative. Our work continues this effort, introducing two simple yet effective designs to better leverage richly described synthetic captions. Firstly, by observing a strong inverse effect in learning with synthetic captions -- the short synthetic captions can generally lead to MUCH higher performance than full-length ones -- we therefore fed only partial synthetic captions to the text encoder. Secondly, we incorporate an autoregressive captioner to mimic the recaptioning process -- by conditioning on the paired image input and web-crawled text description, the captioner learns to predict the full-length synthetic caption generated by advanced MLLMs. Experiments show that our framework significantly improves zero-shot performance in cross-modal retrieval tasks, setting new SOTA results on MSCOCO and Flickr30K. Moreover, such trained vision encoders can enhance the visual capability of LLaVA, showing strong improvements on a range of MLLM benchmarks. Our project page is https://ucsc-vlaa.github.io/CLIPS/.

Image captioning, which generates natural language descriptions of the visual information in an image, is a crucial task in vision-language research. Previous models have typically addressed this task by aligning the generative capabilities of machines with human intelligence through statistical fitting of existing datasets. While effective for normal images, they may struggle to accurately describe those where certain parts of the image are obscured or edited, unlike humans who excel in such cases. These weaknesses they exhibit, including hallucinations and limited interpretability, often hinder performance in scenarios with shifted association patterns. In this paper, we present a generic image captioning framework that employs causal inference to make existing models more capable of interventional tasks, and counterfactually explainable. Our approach includes two variants leveraging either total effect or natural direct effect. Integrating them into the training process enables models to handle counterfactual scenarios, increasing their generalizability. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that our method effectively reduces hallucinations and improves the model's faithfulness to images, demonstrating high portability across both small-scale and large-scale image-to-text models. The code is available at https://github.com/Aman-4-Real/See-or-Guess.

Referring Expression Generation (REG) is a core task for evaluating the pragmatic competence of vision-language systems, requiring not only accurate semantic grounding but also adherence to principles of cooperative communication (Grice, 1975). However, current evaluations of vision-language models (VLMs) often overlook the pragmatic dimension, reducing REG to a region-based captioning task and neglecting Gricean maxims. In this work, we revisit REG from a pragmatic perspective, introducing a new dataset (RefOI) of 1.5k images annotated with both written and spoken referring expressions. Through a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art VLMs, we identify three key failures of pragmatic competence: (1) failure to uniquely identify the referent, (2) inclusion of excessive or irrelevant information, and (3) misalignment with human pragmatic preference, such as the underuse of minimal spatial cues. We also show that standard automatic evaluations fail to capture these pragmatic violations, reinforcing superficial cues rather than genuine referential success. Our findings call for a renewed focus on pragmatically informed models and evaluation frameworks that align with real human communication.

Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In this paper, we study the interpretation of two non-compositional figurative languages (idioms and similes). We collected datasets of fictional narratives containing a figurative expression along with crowd-sourced plausible and implausible continuations relying on the correct interpretation of the expression. We then trained models to choose or generate the plausible continuation. Our experiments show that models based solely on pre-trained language models perform substantially worse than humans on these tasks. We additionally propose knowledge-enhanced models, adopting human strategies for interpreting figurative language types : inferring meaning from the context and relying on the constituent words' literal meanings. The knowledge-enhanced models improve the performance on both the discriminative and generative tasks, further bridging the gap from human performance.

Writing Assistants (e.g., Grammarly, Microsoft Copilot) traditionally generate diverse image captions by employing syntactic and semantic variations to describe image components. However, human-written captions prioritize conveying a central message alongside visual descriptions using pragmatic cues. To enhance pragmatic diversity, it is essential to explore alternative ways of communicating these messages in conjunction with visual content. To address this challenge, we propose RONA, a novel prompting strategy for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLM) that leverages Coherence Relations as an axis for variation. We demonstrate that RONA generates captions with better overall diversity and ground-truth alignment, compared to MLLM baselines across multiple domains. Our code is available at: https://github.com/aashish2000/RONA

Recent multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle to generate personalized image captions, even when trained on high-quality captions. In this work, we observe that such limitations persist in existing post-training-based MLLM personalization methods. Specifically, despite being post-tuned with large-scale caption data through supervised fine-tuning (SFT), these models frequently fail to produce faithful descriptions in real-world scenarios, such as multi-concept image captioning. However, acquiring large-scale, high-quality captions for such complex settings is both costly and difficult. To address the data-centric nature of SFT, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first RL-based approach to post-train MLLMs for personalized image captioning. Our method significantly enhances both visual recognition and personalized generation capabilities of MLLMs, and consistently outperforms existing SFT-based baselines, especially in the challenging multi-concept image captioning task.

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in video captioning, practical applications require captions that follow specific user instructions rather than generating exhaustive, unconstrained descriptions. Current benchmarks, however, primarily assess descriptive comprehensiveness while largely overlooking instruction-following capabilities. To address this gap, we introduce IF-VidCap, a new benchmark for evaluating controllable video captioning, which contains 1,400 high-quality samples. Distinct from existing video captioning or general instruction-following benchmarks, IF-VidCap incorporates a systematic framework that assesses captions on two dimensions: format correctness and content correctness. Our comprehensive evaluation of over 20 prominent models reveals a nuanced landscape: despite the continued dominance of proprietary models, the performance gap is closing, with top-tier open-source solutions now achieving near-parity. Furthermore, we find that models specialized for dense captioning underperform general-purpose MLLMs on complex instructions, indicating that future work should simultaneously advance both descriptive richness and instruction-following fidelity.

Contextualized Image Captioning (CIC) evolves traditional image captioning into a more complex domain, necessitating the ability for multimodal reasoning. It aims to generate image captions given specific contextual information. This paper further introduces a novel domain of Controllable Contextualized Image Captioning (Ctrl-CIC). Unlike CIC, which solely relies on broad context, Ctrl-CIC accentuates a user-defined highlight, compelling the model to tailor captions that resonate with the highlighted aspects of the context. We present two approaches, Prompting-based Controller (P-Ctrl) and Recalibration-based Controller (R-Ctrl), to generate focused captions. P-Ctrl conditions the model generation on highlight by prepending captions with highlight-driven prefixes, whereas R-Ctrl tunes the model to selectively recalibrate the encoder embeddings for highlighted tokens. Additionally, we design a GPT-4V empowered evaluator to assess the quality of the controlled captions alongside standard assessment methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficient and effective controllability of our method, charting a new direction in achieving user-adaptive image captioning. Code is available at https://github.com/ShunqiM/Ctrl-CIC .

We propose Visual News Captioner, an entity-aware model for the task of news image captioning. We also introduce Visual News, a large-scale benchmark consisting of more than one million news images along with associated news articles, image captions, author information, and other metadata. Unlike the standard image captioning task, news images depict situations where people, locations, and events are of paramount importance. Our proposed method can effectively combine visual and textual features to generate captions with richer information such as events and entities. More specifically, built upon the Transformer architecture, our model is further equipped with novel multi-modal feature fusion techniques and attention mechanisms, which are designed to generate named entities more accurately. Our method utilizes much fewer parameters while achieving slightly better prediction results than competing methods. Our larger and more diverse Visual News dataset further highlights the remaining challenges in captioning news images.

With the recent popularity of animated GIFs on social media, there is need for ways to index them with rich metadata. To advance research on animated GIF understanding, we collected a new dataset, Tumblr GIF (TGIF), with 100K animated GIFs from Tumblr and 120K natural language descriptions obtained via crowdsourcing. The motivation for this work is to develop a testbed for image sequence description systems, where the task is to generate natural language descriptions for animated GIFs or video clips. To ensure a high quality dataset, we developed a series of novel quality controls to validate free-form text input from crowdworkers. We show that there is unambiguous association between visual content and natural language descriptions in our dataset, making it an ideal benchmark for the visual content captioning task. We perform extensive statistical analyses to compare our dataset to existing image and video description datasets. Next, we provide baseline results on the animated GIF description task, using three representative techniques: nearest neighbor, statistical machine translation, and recurrent neural networks. Finally, we show that models fine-tuned from our animated GIF description dataset can be helpful for automatic movie description.

Figurative and non-literal expressions are profoundly integrated in human communication. Visualising such expressions allow us to convey our creative thoughts, and evoke nuanced emotions. Recent text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion, on the other hand, struggle to depict non-literal expressions. Recent works primarily deal with this issue by compiling humanly annotated datasets on a small scale, which not only demands specialised expertise but also proves highly inefficient. To address this issue, we introduce ViPE: Visualise Pretty-much Everything. ViPE offers a series of lightweight and robust language models that have been trained on a large-scale set of lyrics with noisy visual descriptions that represent their implicit meaning. The synthetic visual descriptions are generated by GPT3.5 relying on neither human annotations nor images. ViPE effectively expresses any arbitrary piece of text into a visualisable description, enabling meaningful and high-quality image generation. We provide compelling evidence that ViPE is more robust than GPT3.5 in synthesising visual elaborations. ViPE also exhibits an understanding of figurative expressions comparable to human experts, providing a powerful and open-source backbone to many downstream applications such as music video and caption generation.

Long videos contain a vast amount of information, making video-text retrieval an essential and challenging task in multimodal learning. However, existing benchmarks suffer from limited video duration, low-quality captions, and coarse annotation granularity, which hinder the evaluation of advanced video-text retrieval methods. To address these limitations, we introduce LoVR, a benchmark specifically designed for long video-text retrieval. LoVR contains 467 long videos and over 40,804 fine-grained clips with high-quality captions. To overcome the issue of poor machine-generated annotations, we propose an efficient caption generation framework that integrates VLM automatic generation, caption quality scoring, and dynamic refinement. This pipeline improves annotation accuracy while maintaining scalability. Furthermore, we introduce a semantic fusion method to generate coherent full-video captions without losing important contextual information. Our benchmark introduces longer videos, more detailed captions, and a larger-scale dataset, presenting new challenges for video understanding and retrieval. Extensive experiments on various advanced embedding models demonstrate that LoVR is a challenging benchmark, revealing the limitations of current approaches and providing valuable insights for future research. We release the code and dataset link at https://github.com/TechNomad-ds/LoVR-benchmark

Captions are crucial for understanding scientific visualizations and documents. Existing captioning methods for scientific figures rely on figure-caption pairs extracted from documents for training, many of which fall short with respect to metrics like helpfulness, explainability, and visual-descriptiveness [15] leading to generated captions being misaligned with reader preferences. To enable the generation of high-quality figure captions, we introduce FigCaps-HF a new framework for figure-caption generation that can incorporate domain expert feedback in generating captions optimized for reader preferences. Our framework comprises of 1) an automatic method for evaluating quality of figure-caption pairs, 2) a novel reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) method to optimize a generative figure-to-caption model for reader preferences. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our simple learning framework by improving performance over standard fine-tuning across different types of models. In particular, when using BLIP as the base model, our RLHF framework achieves a mean gain of 35.7%, 16.9%, and 9% in ROUGE, BLEU, and Meteor, respectively. Finally, we release a large-scale benchmark dataset with human feedback on figure-caption pairs to enable further evaluation and development of RLHF techniques for this problem.

We introduce a formal information-theoretic framework for image captioning by regarding it as a representation learning task. Our framework defines three key objectives: task sufficiency, minimal redundancy, and human interpretability. Building upon this foundation, we propose a novel Pyramid of Captions (PoCa) method, which constructs caption pyramids by generating localized captions for zoomed-in image patches and integrating them with global caption information using large language models. This approach leverages intuition that the detailed examination of local patches can reduce error risks and address inaccuracies in global captions, either by correcting the hallucination or adding missing details. Based on our theoretical framework, we formalize this intuition and provide formal proof demonstrating the effectiveness of PoCa under certain assumptions. Empirical tests with various image captioning models and large language models show that PoCa consistently yields more informative and semantically aligned captions, maintaining brevity and interpretability.

Figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, and idioms allow language to be expressive, invoke emotion, and communicate abstract ideas that might otherwise be difficult to visualize. These figurative forms are often conveyed through multiple modes, such as text and images, and frequently appear in advertising, news, social media, etc. Understanding multimodal figurative language is an essential component of human communication, and it plays a significant role in our daily interactions. While humans can intuitively understand multimodal figurative language, this poses a challenging task for machines that requires the cognitive ability to map between domains, abstraction, commonsense, and profound language and cultural knowledge. In this work, we propose the Image Recognition of Figurative Language dataset to examine vision and language models' understanding of figurative language. We leverage human annotation and an automatic pipeline we created to generate a multimodal dataset and introduce two novel tasks as a benchmark for multimodal figurative understanding. We experiment with several baseline models and find that all perform substantially worse than humans. We hope our dataset and benchmark will drive the development of models that will better understand figurative language.

This paper presents ScaleCap, an inference-time scalable image captioning strategy that generates comprehensive and detailed image captions. The key challenges of high-quality image captioning lie in the inherent biases of LVLMs: multimodal bias resulting in imbalanced descriptive granularity, offering detailed accounts of some elements while merely skimming over others; linguistic bias leading to hallucinated descriptions of non-existent objects. To address these issues, we propose a scalable debiased captioning strategy, which continuously enriches and calibrates the caption with increased inference budget. Specifically, we propose two novel components: heuristic question answering and contrastive sentence rating. The former generates content-specific questions based on the image and answers them to progressively inject relevant information into the caption. The latter employs sentence-level offline contrastive decoding to effectively identify and eliminate hallucinations caused by linguistic biases. With increased inference cost, more heuristic questions are raised by ScaleCap to progressively capture additional visual details, generating captions that are more accurate, balanced, and informative. Extensive modality alignment experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ScaleCap. Annotating 450K images with ScaleCap and using them for LVLM pretraining leads to consistent performance gains across 11 widely used benchmarks. Furthermore, ScaleCap showcases superb richness and fidelity of generated captions with two additional tasks: replacing images with captions in VQA task, and reconstructing images from captions to assess semantic coverage. Code is available at https://github.com/Cooperx521/ScaleCap.

Clickbait posts are a widespread problem in the webspace. The generation of spoilers, i.e. short texts that neutralize clickbait by providing information that satisfies the curiosity induced by it, is one of the proposed solutions to the problem. Current state-of-the-art methods are based on passage retrieval or question answering approaches and are limited to generating spoilers only in the form of a phrase or a passage. In this work, we propose an ensemble of fine-tuned large language models for clickbait spoiler generation. Our approach is not limited to phrase or passage spoilers, but is also able to generate multipart spoilers that refer to several non-consecutive parts of text. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed ensemble model outperforms the baselines in terms of BLEU, METEOR and BERTScore metrics.

The massive growth of image-text data through web crawling inherently presents the challenge of variability in data quality. This paper introduces a novel algorithm, rooted in human knowledge, to compress this vast corpus of web-crawled image-text datasets to a compact and high-quality form. Our method unfolds in three major steps. First, we collect an image-text dataset, wherein each image is associated with multiple captions sourced from diverse origins. Then, to systemically capture human preferences regarding the best caption paired with each image, we establish a comprehensive set of both subjective and objective criteria for critically guiding the alignment assessment from labelers. Lastly, we train a reward model on the annotated dataset to internalize the nuanced human understanding of image-text alignment. The resulting reward model thus can act as a human-like referee to filter misaligned/low-quality image-text pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we are able to secure (or even improve) model performance by compressing the image-text datasets up to ~90%. An impressive example is that, by aggressively reducing the total training sample from 130M to 15.5M (e.g., ~9x smaller), our BLIP-B/16 models still consistently show superior performance compared with the full-size-dataset counterpart on image-text retrieval (Flickr30K, COCO) by ~2.5% in Recall@1, and on image-captioning (Nocaps, COCO) by ~10.0% in CIDEr and ~2.7% in SPICE.

Social media abounds with multimodal sarcasm, and identifying sarcasm targets is particularly challenging due to the implicit incongruity not directly evident in the text and image modalities. Current methods for Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification (MSTI) predominantly focus on superficial indicators in an end-to-end manner, overlooking the nuanced understanding of multimodal sarcasm conveyed through both the text and image. This paper proposes a versatile MSTI framework with a coarse-to-fine paradigm, by augmenting sarcasm explainability with reasoning and pre-training knowledge. Inspired by the powerful capacity of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on multimodal reasoning, we first engage LMMs to generate competing rationales for coarser-grained pre-training of a small language model on multimodal sarcasm detection. We then propose fine-tuning the model for finer-grained sarcasm target identification. Our framework is thus empowered to adeptly unveil the intricate targets within multimodal sarcasm and mitigate the negative impact posed by potential noise inherently in LMMs. Experimental results demonstrate that our model far outperforms state-of-the-art MSTI methods, and markedly exhibits explainability in deciphering sarcasm as well.

We propose an approach to referring expression generation (REG) in visually grounded dialogue that is meant to produce referring expressions (REs) that are both discriminative and discourse-appropriate. Our method constitutes a two-stage process. First, we model REG as a text- and image-conditioned next-token prediction task. REs are autoregressively generated based on their preceding linguistic context and a visual representation of the referent. Second, we propose the use of discourse-aware comprehension guiding as part of a generate-and-rerank strategy through which candidate REs generated with our REG model are reranked based on their discourse-dependent discriminatory power. Results from our human evaluation indicate that our proposed two-stage approach is effective in producing discriminative REs, with higher performance in terms of text-image retrieval accuracy for reranked REs compared to those generated using greedy decoding.

Recent text-to-image generative models have enabled us to transform our words into vibrant, captivating imagery. The surge of personalization techniques that has followed has also allowed us to imagine unique concepts in new scenes. However, an intriguing question remains: How can we generate a new, imaginary concept that has never been seen before? In this paper, we present the task of creative text-to-image generation, where we seek to generate new members of a broad category (e.g., generating a pet that differs from all existing pets). We leverage the under-studied Diffusion Prior models and show that the creative generation problem can be formulated as an optimization process over the output space of the diffusion prior, resulting in a set of "prior constraints". To keep our generated concept from converging into existing members, we incorporate a question-answering model that adaptively adds new constraints to the optimization problem, encouraging the model to discover increasingly more unique creations. Finally, we show that our prior constraints can also serve as a strong mixing mechanism allowing us to create hybrids between generated concepts, introducing even more flexibility into the creative process.

Controllable image captioning is an emerging multimodal topic that aims to describe the image with natural language following human purpose, e.g., looking at the specified regions or telling in a particular text style. State-of-the-art methods are trained on annotated pairs of input controls and output captions. However, the scarcity of such well-annotated multimodal data largely limits their usability and scalability for interactive AI systems. Leveraging unimodal instruction-following foundation models is a promising alternative that benefits from broader sources of data. In this paper, we present Caption AnyThing (CAT), a foundation model augmented image captioning framework supporting a wide range of multimodel controls: 1) visual controls, including points, boxes, and trajectories; 2) language controls, such as sentiment, length, language, and factuality. Powered by Segment Anything Model (SAM) and ChatGPT, we unify the visual and language prompts into a modularized framework, enabling the flexible combination between different controls. Extensive case studies demonstrate the user intention alignment capabilities of our framework, shedding light on effective user interaction modeling in vision-language applications. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ttengwang/Caption-Anything.

Parody is an emerging phenomenon on social media, where individuals imitate a role or position opposite to their own, often for humor, provocation, or controversy. Detecting and analyzing parody can be challenging and is often reliant on context, yet it plays a crucial role in understanding cultural values, promoting subcultures, and enhancing self-expression. However, the study of parody is hindered by limited available data and deficient diversity in current datasets. To bridge this gap, we built seven parody datasets from both English and Chinese corpora, with 14,755 annotated users and 21,210 annotated comments in total. To provide sufficient context information, we also collect replies and construct user-interaction graphs to provide richer contextual information, which is lacking in existing datasets. With these datasets, we test traditional methods and Large Language Models (LLMs) on three key tasks: (1) parody detection, (2) comment sentiment analysis with parody, and (3) user sentiment analysis with parody. Our extensive experiments reveal that parody-related tasks still remain challenging for all models, and contextual information plays a critical role. Interestingly, we find that, in certain scenarios, traditional sentence embedding methods combined with simple classifiers can outperform advanced LLMs, i.e. DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-o3, highlighting parody as a significant challenge for LLMs.

Generating ambient sounds and effects is a challenging problem due to data scarcity and often insufficient caption quality, making it difficult to employ large-scale generative models for the task. In this work, we tackle the problem by introducing two new models. First, we propose AutoCap, a high-quality and efficient automatic audio captioning model. We show that by leveraging metadata available with the audio modality, we can substantially improve the quality of captions. AutoCap reaches CIDEr score of 83.2, marking a 3.2% improvement from the best available captioning model at four times faster inference speed. We then use AutoCap to caption clips from existing datasets, obtaining 761,000 audio clips with high-quality captions, forming the largest available audio-text dataset. Second, we propose GenAu, a scalable transformer-based audio generation architecture that we scale up to 1.25B parameters and train with our new dataset. When compared to state-of-the-art audio generators, GenAu obtains significant improvements of 15.7% in FAD score, 22.7% in IS, and 13.5% in CLAP score, indicating significantly improved quality of generated audio compared to previous works. This shows that the quality of data is often as important as its quantity. Besides, since AutoCap is fully automatic, new audio samples can be added to the training dataset, unlocking the training of even larger generative models for audio synthesis.

Existing humor datasets and evaluations predominantly focus on English, leaving limited resources for culturally nuanced humor in non-English languages like Chinese. To address this gap, we construct Chumor, the first Chinese humor explanation dataset that exceeds the size of existing humor datasets. Chumor is sourced from Ruo Zhi Ba, a Chinese Reddit-like platform known for sharing intellectually challenging and culturally specific jokes. We test ten LLMs through direct and chain-of-thought prompting, revealing that Chumor poses significant challenges to existing LLMs, with their accuracy slightly above random and far below human. In addition, our analysis highlights that human-annotated humor explanations are significantly better than those generated by GPT-4o and ERNIE-4-turbo. We release Chumor at https://huggingface.co/datasets/dnaihao/Chumor, our project page is at https://dnaihao.github.io/Chumor-dataset/, our leaderboard is at https://huggingface.co/spaces/dnaihao/Chumor, and our codebase is at https://github.com/dnaihao/Chumor-dataset.

Video captioning aims to generate natural language descriptions according to the content, where representation learning plays a crucial role. Existing methods are mainly developed within the supervised learning framework via word-by-word comparison of the generated caption against the ground-truth text without fully exploiting linguistic semantics. In this work, we propose a hierarchical modular network to bridge video representations and linguistic semantics from three levels before generating captions. In particular, the hierarchy is composed of: (I) Entity level, which highlights objects that are most likely to be mentioned in captions. (II) Predicate level, which learns the actions conditioned on highlighted objects and is supervised by the predicate in captions. (III) Sentence level, which learns the global semantic representation and is supervised by the whole caption. Each level is implemented by one module. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art models on the two widely-used benchmarks: MSVD 104.0% and MSR-VTT 51.5% in CIDEr score.

Generating a description of an image is called image captioning. Image captioning requires to recognize the important objects, their attributes and their relationships in an image. It also needs to generate syntactically and semantically correct sentences. Deep learning-based techniques are capable of handling the complexities and challenges of image captioning. In this survey paper, we aim to present a comprehensive review of existing deep learning-based image captioning techniques. We discuss the foundation of the techniques to analyze their performances, strengths and limitations. We also discuss the datasets and the evaluation metrics popularly used in deep learning based automatic image captioning.

Image captioning bridges the gap between vision and language by automatically generating natural language descriptions for images. Traditional image captioning methods often overlook the preferences and characteristics of users. Personalized image captioning solves this problem by incorporating user prior knowledge into the model, such as writing styles and preferred vocabularies. Most existing methods emphasize the user context fusion process by memory networks or transformers. However, these methods ignore the distinct domains of each dataset. Therefore, they need to update the entire caption model parameters when meeting new samples, which is time-consuming and calculation-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose a novel personalized image captioning framework that leverages user context to consider personality factors. Additionally, our framework utilizes the prefix-tuning paradigm to extract knowledge from a frozen large language model, reducing the gap between different language domains. Specifically, we employ CLIP to extract the visual features of an image and align the semantic space using a query-guided mapping network. By incorporating the transformer layer, we merge the visual features with the user's contextual prior knowledge to generate informative prefixes. Moreover, we employ GPT-2 as the frozen large language model. With a small number of parameters to be trained, our model performs efficiently and effectively. Our model outperforms existing baseline models on Instagram and YFCC100M datasets across five evaluation metrics, demonstrating its superiority, including twofold improvements in metrics such as BLEU-4 and CIDEr.

Text-to-image generation models are powerful but difficult to use. Users craft specific prompts to get better images, though the images can be repetitive. This paper proposes a Prompt Expansion framework that helps users generate high-quality, diverse images with less effort. The Prompt Expansion model takes a text query as input and outputs a set of expanded text prompts that are optimized such that when passed to a text-to-image model, generates a wider variety of appealing images. We conduct a human evaluation study that shows that images generated through Prompt Expansion are more aesthetically pleasing and diverse than those generated by baseline methods. Overall, this paper presents a novel and effective approach to improving the text-to-image generation experience.

The recent GPT-4 has demonstrated extraordinary multi-modal abilities, such as directly generating websites from handwritten text and identifying humorous elements within images. These features are rarely observed in previous vision-language models. We believe the primary reason for GPT-4's advanced multi-modal generation capabilities lies in the utilization of a more advanced large language model (LLM). To examine this phenomenon, we present MiniGPT-4, which aligns a frozen visual encoder with a frozen LLM, Vicuna, using just one projection layer. Our findings reveal that MiniGPT-4 possesses many capabilities similar to those exhibited by GPT-4 like detailed image description generation and website creation from hand-written drafts. Furthermore, we also observe other emerging capabilities in MiniGPT-4, including writing stories and poems inspired by given images, providing solutions to problems shown in images, teaching users how to cook based on food photos, etc. In our experiment, we found that only performing the pretraining on raw image-text pairs could produce unnatural language outputs that lack coherency including repetition and fragmented sentences. To address this problem, we curate a high-quality, well-aligned dataset in the second stage to finetune our model using a conversational template. This step proved crucial for augmenting the model's generation reliability and overall usability. Notably, our model is highly computationally efficient, as we only train a projection layer utilizing approximately 5 million aligned image-text pairs. Our code, pre-trained model, and collected dataset are available at https://minigpt-4.github.io/.

Image-to-text generation aims to describe images using natural language. Recently, zero-shot image captioning based on pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) has made significant progress. However, we have observed and empirically demonstrated that these methods are susceptible to modality bias induced by LLMs and tend to generate descriptions containing objects (entities) that do not actually exist in the image but frequently appear during training (i.e., object hallucination). In this paper, we propose ViECap, a transferable decoding model that leverages entity-aware decoding to generate descriptions in both seen and unseen scenarios. ViECap incorporates entity-aware hard prompts to guide LLMs' attention toward the visual entities present in the image, enabling coherent caption generation across diverse scenes. With entity-aware hard prompts, ViECap is capable of maintaining performance when transferring from in-domain to out-of-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViECap sets a new state-of-the-art cross-domain (transferable) captioning and performs competitively in-domain captioning compared to previous VLMs-based zero-shot methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/FeiElysia/ViECap

Captioning is a crucial and challenging task for video understanding. In videos that involve active agents such as humans, the agent's actions can bring about myriad changes in the scene. Observable changes such as movements, manipulations, and transformations of the objects in the scene, are reflected in conventional video captioning. Unlike images, actions in videos are also inherently linked to social aspects such as intentions (why the action is taking place), effects (what changes due to the action), and attributes that describe the agent. Thus for video understanding, such as when captioning videos or when answering questions about videos, one must have an understanding of these commonsense aspects. We present the first work on generating commonsense captions directly from videos, to describe latent aspects such as intentions, effects, and attributes. We present a new dataset "Video-to-Commonsense (V2C)" that contains sim9k videos of human agents performing various actions, annotated with 3 types of commonsense descriptions. Additionally we explore the use of open-ended video-based commonsense question answering (V2C-QA) as a way to enrich our captions. Both the generation task and the QA task can be used to enrich video captions.

There has been an explosion of work in the vision & language community during the past few years from image captioning to video transcription, and answering questions about images. These tasks have focused on literal descriptions of the image. To move beyond the literal, we choose to explore how questions about an image are often directed at commonsense inference and the abstract events evoked by objects in the image. In this paper, we introduce the novel task of Visual Question Generation (VQG), where the system is tasked with asking a natural and engaging question when shown an image. We provide three datasets which cover a variety of images from object-centric to event-centric, with considerably more abstract training data than provided to state-of-the-art captioning systems thus far. We train and test several generative and retrieval models to tackle the task of VQG. Evaluation results show that while such models ask reasonable questions for a variety of images, there is still a wide gap with human performance which motivates further work on connecting images with commonsense knowledge and pragmatics. Our proposed task offers a new challenge to the community which we hope furthers interest in exploring deeper connections between vision & language.

Effectively aligning with human judgment when evaluating machine-generated image captions represents a complex yet intriguing challenge. Existing evaluation metrics like CIDEr or CLIP-Score fall short in this regard as they do not take into account the corresponding image or lack the capability of encoding fine-grained details and penalizing hallucinations. To overcome these issues, in this paper, we propose BRIDGE, a new learnable and reference-free image captioning metric that employs a novel module to map visual features into dense vectors and integrates them into multi-modal pseudo-captions which are built during the evaluation process. This approach results in a multimodal metric that properly incorporates information from the input image without relying on reference captions, bridging the gap between human judgment and machine-generated image captions. Experiments spanning several datasets demonstrate that our proposal achieves state-of-the-art results compared to existing reference-free evaluation scores. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/bridge-score.

While many BERT-based cross-modal pre-trained models produce excellent results on downstream understanding tasks like image-text retrieval and VQA, they cannot be applied to generation tasks directly. In this paper, we propose XGPT, a new method of Cross-modal Generative Pre-Training for Image Captioning that is designed to pre-train text-to-image caption generators through three novel generation tasks, including Image-conditioned Masked Language Modeling (IMLM), Image-conditioned Denoising Autoencoding (IDA), and Text-conditioned Image Feature Generation (TIFG). As a result, the pre-trained XGPT can be fine-tuned without any task-specific architecture modifications to create state-of-the-art models for image captioning. Experiments show that XGPT obtains new state-of-the-art results on the benchmark datasets, including COCO Captions and Flickr30k Captions. We also use XGPT to generate new image captions as data augmentation for the image retrieval task and achieve significant improvement on all recall metrics.

Humans possess multimodal literacy, allowing them to actively integrate information from various modalities to form reasoning. Faced with challenges like lexical ambiguity in text, we supplement this with other modalities, such as thumbnail images or textbook illustrations. Is it possible for machines to achieve a similar multimodal understanding capability? In response, we present Understanding Pun with Image Explanations (UNPIE), a novel benchmark designed to assess the impact of multimodal inputs in resolving lexical ambiguities. Puns serve as the ideal subject for this evaluation due to their intrinsic ambiguity. Our dataset includes 1,000 puns, each accompanied by an image that explains both meanings. We pose three multimodal challenges with the annotations to assess different aspects of multimodal literacy; Pun Grounding, Disambiguation, and Reconstruction. The results indicate that various Socratic Models and Visual-Language Models improve over the text-only models when given visual context, particularly as the complexity of the tasks increases.

Zero-shot captioners are recently proposed models that utilize common-space vision-language representations to caption images without relying on paired image-text data. To caption an image, they proceed by textually decoding a text-aligned image feature, but they limit their scope to global representations and whole-image captions. We present , a unified framework for zero-shot captioning that shifts from an image-centric to a patch-centric paradigm, enabling the captioning of arbitrary regions without the need of region-level supervision. Instead of relying on global image representations, we treat individual patches as atomic captioning units and aggregate them to describe arbitrary regions, from single patches to non-contiguous areas and entire images. We analyze the key ingredients that enable current latent captioners to work in our novel proposed framework. Experiments demonstrate that backbones producing meaningful, dense visual features, such as DINO, are key to achieving state-of-the-art performance in multiple region-based captioning tasks. Compared to other baselines and state-of-the-art competitors, our models achieve better performance on zero-shot dense, region-set, and a newly introduced trace captioning task, highlighting the effectiveness of patch-wise semantic representations for scalable caption generation. Project page at https://paciosoft.com/Patch-ioner/ .

We introduce Playground v3 (PGv3), our latest text-to-image model that achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance across multiple testing benchmarks, excels in graphic design abilities and introduces new capabilities. Unlike traditional text-to-image generative models that rely on pre-trained language models like T5 or CLIP text encoders, our approach fully integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with a novel structure that leverages text conditions exclusively from a decoder-only LLM. Additionally, to enhance image captioning quality-we developed an in-house captioner, capable of generating captions with varying levels of detail, enriching the diversity of text structures. We also introduce a new benchmark CapsBench to evaluate detailed image captioning performance. Experimental results demonstrate that PGv3 excels in text prompt adherence, complex reasoning, and accurate text rendering. User preference studies indicate the super-human graphic design ability of our model for common design applications, such as stickers, posters, and logo designs. Furthermore, PGv3 introduces new capabilities, including precise RGB color control and robust multilingual understanding.

In this work, we aim to analyze and optimize the EnCLAP framework, a state-of-the-art model in automated audio captioning. We investigate the impact of modifying the acoustic encoder components, explore pretraining with different dataset scales, and study the effectiveness of a reranking scheme. Through extensive experimentation and quantitative analysis of generated captions, we develop EnCLAP++, an enhanced version that significantly surpasses the original.

Neural sequence models are widely used to model time-series data. Equally ubiquitous is the usage of beam search (BS) as an approximate inference algorithm to decode output sequences from these models. BS explores the search space in a greedy left-right fashion retaining only the top-B candidates - resulting in sequences that differ only slightly from each other. Producing lists of nearly identical sequences is not only computationally wasteful but also typically fails to capture the inherent ambiguity of complex AI tasks. To overcome this problem, we propose Diverse Beam Search (DBS), an alternative to BS that decodes a list of diverse outputs by optimizing for a diversity-augmented objective. We observe that our method finds better top-1 solutions by controlling for the exploration and exploitation of the search space - implying that DBS is a better search algorithm. Moreover, these gains are achieved with minimal computational or memory over- head as compared to beam search. To demonstrate the broad applicability of our method, we present results on image captioning, machine translation and visual question generation using both standard quantitative metrics and qualitative human studies. Further, we study the role of diversity for image-grounded language generation tasks as the complexity of the image changes. We observe that our method consistently outperforms BS and previously proposed techniques for diverse decoding from neural sequence models.

We present a self-supervised method to improve an agent's abilities in describing arbitrary objects while actively exploring a generic environment. This is a challenging problem, as current models struggle to obtain coherent image captions due to different camera viewpoints and clutter. We propose a three-phase framework to fine-tune existing captioning models that enhances caption accuracy and consistency across views via a consensus mechanism. First, an agent explores the environment, collecting noisy image-caption pairs. Then, a consistent pseudo-caption for each object instance is distilled via consensus using a large language model. Finally, these pseudo-captions are used to fine-tune an off-the-shelf captioning model, with the addition of contrastive learning. We analyse the performance of the combination of captioning models, exploration policies, pseudo-labeling methods, and fine-tuning strategies, on our manually labeled test set. Results show that a policy can be trained to mine samples with higher disagreement compared to classical baselines. Our pseudo-captioning method, in combination with all policies, has a higher semantic similarity compared to other existing methods, and fine-tuning improves caption accuracy and consistency by a significant margin. Code and test set annotations available at https://hsp-iit.github.io/embodied-captioning/

Many high-level skills that are required for computer vision tasks, such as parsing questions, comparing and contrasting semantics, and writing descriptions, are also required in other domains such as natural language processing. In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to learn those skills from text data and then transfer them to vision tasks without ever training on visual training data. Key to our approach is exploiting the joint embedding space of contrastively trained vision and language encoders. In practice, there can be systematic differences between embedding spaces for different modalities in contrastive models, and we analyze how these differences affect our approach and study strategies to mitigate this concern. We produce models using only text training data on four representative tasks: image captioning, visual entailment, visual question answering and visual news captioning, and evaluate them on standard benchmarks using images. We find these models perform close to models trained on images, while surpassing prior work for captioning and visual entailment in this text-only setting by over 9 points, and outperforming all prior work on visual news by over 30 points. We also showcase a variety of stylistic image captioning models that are trained using no image data and no human-curated language data, but instead using readily-available text data from books, the web, or language models.

Predicting context-dependent and non-literal utterances like sarcastic and ironic expressions still remains a challenging task in NLP, as it goes beyond linguistic patterns, encompassing common sense and shared knowledge as crucial components. To capture complex morpho-syntactic features that can usually serve as indicators for irony or sarcasm across dynamic contexts, we propose a model that uses character-level vector representations of words, based on ELMo. We test our model on 7 different datasets derived from 3 different data sources, providing state-of-the-art performance in 6 of them, and otherwise offering competitive results.

Recent video and language pretraining frameworks lack the ability to generate sentences. We present Multimodal Video Generative Pretraining (MV-GPT), a new pretraining framework for learning from unlabelled videos which can be effectively used for generative tasks such as multimodal video captioning. Unlike recent video-language pretraining frameworks, our framework trains both a multimodal video encoder and a sentence decoder jointly. To overcome the lack of captions in unlabelled videos, we leverage the future utterance as an additional text source and propose a bidirectional generation objective -- we generate future utterances given the present mulitmodal context, and also the present utterance given future observations. With this objective, we train an encoder-decoder model end-to-end to generate a caption from raw pixels and transcribed speech directly. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for multimodal video captioning on four standard benchmarks, as well as for other video understanding tasks such as VideoQA, video retrieval and action classification.

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) models maximize the mutual information between text and visual modalities to learn representations. This makes the nature of the training data a significant factor in the efficacy of CLIP for downstream tasks. However, the lack of compositional diversity in contemporary image-text datasets limits the compositional reasoning ability of CLIP. We show that generating ``hard'' negative captions via in-context learning and synthesizing corresponding negative images with text-to-image generators offers a solution. We introduce a novel contrastive pre-training strategy that leverages these hard negative captions and images in an alternating fashion to train CLIP. We demonstrate that our method, named TripletCLIP, when applied to existing datasets such as CC3M and CC12M, enhances the compositional capabilities of CLIP, resulting in an absolute improvement of over 9% on the SugarCrepe benchmark on an equal computational budget, as well as improvements in zero-shot image classification and image retrieval. Our code, models, and data are available at: https://tripletclip.github.io

As interest grows in generating long, detailed image captions, standard evaluation metrics become increasingly unreliable. N-gram-based metrics though efficient, fail to capture semantic correctness. Representational Similarity (RS) metrics, designed to address this, initially saw limited use due to high computational costs, while today, despite advances in hardware, they remain unpopular due to low correlation to human judgments. Meanwhile, metrics based on large language models (LLMs) show strong correlation with human judgments, but remain too expensive for iterative use during model development. We introduce SPECS (Specificity-Enhanced CLIPScore), a reference-free RS metric tailored to long image captioning. SPECS modifies CLIP with a new objective that emphasizes specificity: rewarding correct details and penalizing incorrect ones. We show that SPECS matches the performance of open-source LLM-based metrics in correlation to human judgments, while being far more efficient. This makes it a practical alternative for iterative checkpoint evaluation during image captioning model development.Our code can be found at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/SPECS.

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive performance on several commonsense-reasoning benchmark datasets. However, building machines with commonsense to compose realistically plausible sentences remains challenging. In this paper, we present a constrained text generation task, CommonGen associated with a benchmark dataset, to explicitly test machines for the ability of generative commonsense reasoning. Given a set of common concepts (e.g., {dog, frisbee, catch, throw}); the task is to generate a coherent sentence describing an everyday scenario using these concepts (e.g., "a man throws a frisbee and his dog catches it"). The CommonGen task is challenging because it inherently requires 1) relational reasoning with background commonsense knowledge, and 2) compositional generalization ability to work on unseen concept combinations. Our dataset, constructed through a combination of crowdsourced and existing caption corpora, consists of 79k commonsense descriptions over 35k unique concept-sets. Experiments show that there is a large gap between state-of-the-art text generation models (e.g., T5) and human performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the learned generative commonsense reasoning capability can be transferred to improve downstream tasks such as CommonsenseQA by generating additional context.

Despite advancements in text-to-image models, generating images that precisely align with textual descriptions remains challenging due to misalignment in training data. In this paper, we analyze the critical role of caption precision and recall in text-to-image model training. Our analysis of human-annotated captions shows that both precision and recall are important for text-image alignment, but precision has a more significant impact. Leveraging these insights, we utilize Large Vision Language Models to generate synthetic captions for training. Models trained with these synthetic captions show similar behavior to those trained on human-annotated captions, underscores the potential for synthetic data in text-to-image training.

Time series captioning, the task of describing numeric time series in natural language, requires numerical reasoning, trend interpretation, and contextual understanding. Existing benchmarks, however, often rely on synthetic data or overly simplistic captions, and typically neglect metadata and visual representations. To close this gap, we introduce CaTS-Bench, the first large-scale, real-world benchmark for Context-aware Time Series captioning. CaTS-Bench is derived from 11 diverse datasets reframed as captioning and Q&A tasks, comprising roughly 465k training and 105k test timestamps. Each sample includes a numeric series segment, contextual metadata, a line-chart image, and a caption. A key contribution of this work is the scalable pipeline used to generate reference captions: while most references are produced by an oracle LLM and verified through factual checks, human indistinguishability studies, and diversity analyses, we also provide a human-revisited subset of 579 test captions, refined from LLM outputs to ensure accuracy and human-like style. Beyond captioning, CaTS-Bench offers 460 multiple-choice questions targeting deeper aspects of time series reasoning. We further propose new tailored evaluation metrics and benchmark leading VLMs, highlighting both their strengths and persistent limitations. Together, these contributions establish CaTS-Bench and its captioning pipeline as a reliable and extensible foundation for future research at the intersection of time series analysis and foundation models.