IFCap: Image-like Retrieval and Frequency-based Entity Filtering for Zero-shot Captioning
Keywords: Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Multimodal Learning, Text-only Image Captioning
TL;DR: We propose IFCap, leveraging Image-like Retrieval (ILR) and Frequency-based Entity Filtering (EF) to enhance zero-shot captioning by effectively bridging the modality gap and significantly improving caption quality.
Abstract: Recent advancements in image captioning have explored text-only training methods to overcome the limitations of paired image-text data. However, existing text-only training methods often overlook the modality gap between using text data during training and employing images during inference. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Image-like Retrieval, which aligns text features with visually relevant features to mitigate the modality gap. Our method further enhances the accuracy of generated captions by designing a fusion module that integrates retrieved captions with input features. Additionally, we introduce a Frequency-based Entity Filtering technique that significantly improves caption quality. We integrate these methods into a unified framework, which we refer to as $\textbf{IFCap}$ ($\textbf{I}$mage-like Retrieval and $\textbf{F}$requency-based Entity Filtering for Zero-shot $\textbf{Cap}$tioning). Through extensive experimentation, our straightforward yet powerful approach has demonstrated its efficacy, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin in image captioning compared to zero-shot captioning based on text-only training.
Submission Number: 31
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