{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/exploring-annotation-free-image-captioning","title":"Exploring Annotation-free Image Captioning with Retrieval-augmented Pseudo Sentence Generation","arxiv_id":"2307.14750","date":"2023-07-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhiyuan Li","Dongnan Liu","Heng Wang","Chaoyi Zhang","Weidong Cai"],"abstract":"Recently, training an image captioner without annotated image-sentence pairs has gained traction. Previous methods have faced limitations due to either using mismatched corpora for inaccurate pseudo annotations or relying on resource-intensive pre-training. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a new strategy where the prior knowledge from large pre-trained models (LPMs) is distilled and leveraged as supervision, and a retrieval process is integrated to further reinforce its effectiveness. Specifically, we introduce Retrieval-augmented Pseudo Sentence Generation (RaPSG), which can efficiently retrieve highly relevant short region descriptions from the mismatching corpora and use them to generate a variety of high-quality pseudo sentences via LPMs. Additionally, we introduce a fluency filter and a CLIP guidance objective to enhance contrastive information learning. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms SOTA captioning models across various settings including zero-shot, unsupervised, semi-supervised, and cross-domain scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/Zhiyuan-Li-John/RaPSG.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14750v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.14750v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"exploring-annotation-free-image-captioning","repo_url":"https://github.com/zhiyuan-li-john/rapsg","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-captioning","task_name":"Image Captioning"},{"task_slug":"model-optimization","task_name":"Model Optimization"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}