Papers › From Captions to Visual Concepts and Back
From Captions to Visual Concepts and Back
Hao Fang, Saurabh Gupta, Forrest Iandola, Rupesh Srivastava, Li Deng, Piotr Dollár, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaodong He, Margaret Mitchell, John C. Platt, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Geoffrey Zweig
This paper presents a novel approach for automatically generating image descriptions: visual detectors, language models, and multimodal similarity models learnt directly from a dataset of image captions. We use multiple instance learning to train visual detectors for words that commonly occur in captions, including many different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The word detector outputs serve as conditional inputs to a maximum-entropy language model. The language model learns from a set of over 400,000 image descriptions to capture the statistics of word usage. We capture global semantics by re-ranking caption candidates using sentence-level features and a deep multimodal similarity model. Our system is state-of-the-art on the official Microsoft COCO benchmark, producing a BLEU-4 score of 29.1%. When human judges compare the system captions to ones written by other people on our held-out test set, the system captions have equal or better quality 34% of the time.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions | From Captions to Visual Concepts and Back | BLEU-4 | 25.7 | #33 of 41 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions | From Captions to Visual Concepts and Back | METEOR | 23.6 | #33 of 41 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions test | From Captions to Visual Concepts and Back | BLEU-4 | 56.7 | #1 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions test | From Captions to Visual Concepts and Back | CIDEr | 92.5 | #1 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Captioning | COCO Captions test | From Captions to Visual Concepts and Back | METEOR | 33.1 | #1 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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