Updating CLIP to Prefer Descriptions Over Captions

ACL ARR 2024 April Submission393 Authors

Abstract: Although CLIPScore is a powerful generic metric that captures the similarity between a text and an image, it fails to distinguish between a caption that is meant to complement the information in an image and a description that is meant to replace an image entirely, e.g., for accessibility. We address this shortcoming by updating the CLIP model with the Concadia dataset to assign higher scores to descriptions than captions using parameter efficient fine-tuning and a loss objective derived from work on causal interpretability. This model correlates with the judgements of blind and low-vision people while preserving transfer capabilities and has interpretable structure that sheds light on the caption--description distinction.

Paper Type: Short

Research Area: Human-Centered NLP

Research Area Keywords: accessibility; image text matching; counterfactual/contrastive explanations; human-centered evaluation

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 393