Papers › GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language

GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language

27 May 2022arXiv:2205.14100archive 2025-07-28

JianFeng Wang, Zhengyuan Yang, Xiaowei Hu, Linjie Li, Kevin Lin, Zhe Gan, Zicheng Liu, Ce Liu, Lijuan Wang

In this paper, we design and train a Generative Image-to-text Transformer, GIT, to unify vision-language tasks such as image/video captioning and question answering. While generative models provide a consistent network architecture between pre-training and fine-tuning, existing work typically contains complex structures (uni/multi-modal encoder/decoder) and depends on external modules such as object detectors/taggers and optical character recognition (OCR). In GIT, we simplify the architecture as one image encoder and one text decoder under a single language modeling task. We also scale up the pre-training data and the model size to boost the model performance. Without bells and whistles, our GIT establishes new state of the arts on 12 challenging benchmarks with a large margin. For instance, our model surpasses the human performance for the first time on TextCaps (138.2 vs. 125.5 in CIDEr). Furthermore, we present a new scheme of generation-based image classification and scene text recognition, achieving decent performance on standard benchmarks. Codes are released at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text}.

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collate_fn microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/data_layer/builder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 5d94233d7342dec0 · report
convert2valid microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/layers/decoder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 58abe6b119b5a2b9 · report
create_decoder microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/layers/decoder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 57a3be0014115531 · report
create_projecton_layer microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/layers/decoder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · b9dddc85faf8d975 · report
dict_get_path_value microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/common.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · f22bedfd403d31e3 · report
dict_has_path microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/common.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 6f65eda04781768f · report
dict_parse_key microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/common.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · da18a7817154dd3d · report
evaluate_on_coco_caption microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/inference.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 6bcc61acfa076eea · report
get_git_model microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/model.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · a6a3f6c029b05906 · report
get_image_encoder microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/model.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · e1d4e57a259b8791 · report
get_image_transform microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/inference.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 2012616da59774c7 · report
get_inception_train_transform microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/data_layer/transform.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 4fa83e987f597120 · report
get_nick_name microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/taxonomy.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · e3320f89bc0f72e9 · report
get_output_vocab_tokens microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/trie_decoder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 8c354e83280aa3fc · report
get_trie microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/trie_decoder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · b5c278f17b7830d7 · report
load_image_by_pil microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/process_image.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 997799ac1eb508ab · report
noffset_to_synset microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/taxonomy.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · a6ff5ef9a5881a56 · report
parallel_map microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/tsv_io.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 1054c0086f84edf2 · report
read_to_character microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/tsv_io.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 113f9525ed06575b · report
recursive_to_device microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/torch_common.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · ed21fe61a5fa43b4 · report
resize_2d_pos_embed microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text/generativeimage2text/torch_common.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 9564dcc532255c43 · report

Tasks

DecoderImage CaptioningImage ClassificationImage to textLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingOptical Character RecognitionOptical Character Recognition (OCR)Question AnsweringScene Text RecognitionVideo CaptioningVisual Question Answering (VQA)image-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Captioning COCO Captions GIT BLEU-4 44.1 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning COCO Captions GIT CIDER 151.1 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning COCO Captions GIT METEOR 32.2 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning COCO Captions GIT SPICE 26.3 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps entire GIT, Single Model B1 88.1 #2 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps entire GIT, Single Model B2 74.81 #2 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps entire GIT, Single Model B3 57.68 #2 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps entire GIT, Single Model B4 37.35 #2 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps entire GIT, Single Model CIDEr 123.39 #2 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps entire GIT, Single Model METEOR 32.5 #2 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps entire GIT, Single Model ROUGE-L 63.12 #2 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps entire GIT, Single Model SPICE 15.94 #2 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT2, Single Model B1 88.86 #2 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT2, Single Model B2 75.86 #2 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT2, Single Model B3 59.94 #2 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT2, Single Model B4 41.1 #2 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT2, Single Model CIDEr 124.18 #2 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT2, Single Model METEOR 33.83 #2 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT2, Single Model ROUGE-L 63.82 #2 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT2, Single Model SPICE 16.36 #2 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT, Single Model B1 88.55 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT, Single Model B2 76.1 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT, Single Model B3 60.53 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT, Single Model B4 41.65 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT, Single Model CIDEr 122.4 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT, Single Model METEOR 33.41 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT, Single Model ROUGE-L 64.02 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps in-domain GIT, Single Model SPICE 16.18 #3 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT2, Single Model B1 88.9 #1 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT2, Single Model B2 75.86 #1 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT2, Single Model B3 58.9 #1 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT2, Single Model B4 38.95 #1 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT2, Single Model CIDEr 125.51 #1 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT2, Single Model METEOR 32.95 #1 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT2, Single Model ROUGE-L 63.66 #1 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT2, Single Model SPICE 16.11 #1 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT, Single Model B1 88.56 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT, Single Model B2 75.48 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT, Single Model B3 58.46 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT, Single Model B4 38.44 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT, Single Model CIDEr 123.92 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT, Single Model METEOR 32.86 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT, Single Model ROUGE-L 63.5 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps near-domain GIT, Single Model SPICE 15.96 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT2, Single Model B1 86.28 #2 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT2, Single Model B2 71.15 #2 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT2, Single Model B3 52.36 #2 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT2, Single Model B4 30.15 #2 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT2, Single Model CIDEr 122.27 #2 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT2, Single Model METEOR 30.15 #2 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT2, Single Model ROUGE-L 60.91 #2 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT2, Single Model SPICE 15.62 #2 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT, Single Model B1 85.99 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT, Single Model B2 71.28 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT, Single Model B3 52.66 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT, Single Model B4 30.04 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT, Single Model CIDEr 122.04 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT, Single Model METEOR 30.45 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT, Single Model ROUGE-L 60.96 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps out-of-domain GIT, Single Model SPICE 15.7 #3 of 40 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT2 B1 88.43 #1 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT2 B2 75.02 #1 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT2 B3 57.87 #1 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT2 B4 37.65 #1 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT2 CIDEr 124.77 #1 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT2 METEOR 32.56 #1 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT2 ROUGE-L 63.19 #1 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT2 SPICE 16.06 #1 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT B1 88.1 #2 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT B2 74.81 #2 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT B3 57.68 #2 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT B4 37.35 #2 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT CIDEr 123.39 #2 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT METEOR 32.5 #2 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT ROUGE-L 63.12 #2 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD entire GIT SPICE 15.94 #2 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT2 B1 88.86 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT2 B2 75.86 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT2 B3 59.94 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT2 B4 41.1 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT2 CIDEr 124.18 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT2 METEOR 33.83 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT2 ROUGE-L 63.82 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT2 SPICE 16.36 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT B1 88.55 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT B2 76.1 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT B3 60.53 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT B4 41.65 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT CIDEr 122.4 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT METEOR 33.41 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT ROUGE-L 64.02 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD in-domain GIT SPICE 16.18 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT2 B1 88.9 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT2 B2 75.86 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT2 B3 58.9 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT2 B4 38.95 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT2 CIDEr 125.51 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT2 METEOR 32.95 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT2 ROUGE-L 63.66 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT2 SPICE 16.11 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT B1 88.56 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT B2 75.48 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT B3 58.46 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT B4 38.44 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT CIDEr 123.92 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT METEOR 32.86 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT ROUGE-L 63.5 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD near-domain GIT SPICE 15.96 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT2 B1 86.28 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT2 B2 71.15 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT2 B3 52.36 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT2 B4 30.15 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT2 CIDEr 122.27 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT2 METEOR 30.15 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT2 ROUGE-L 60.91 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT2 SPICE 15.62 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT B1 85.99 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT B2 71.28 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT B3 52.66 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT B4 30.04 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT CIDEr 122.04 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT METEOR 30.45 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT ROUGE-L 60.96 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Image Captioning nocaps-XD out-of-domain GIT SPICE 15.7 #2 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT GIT2 BLEU-4 54.8 #3 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT GIT2 CIDEr 75.9 #3 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT GIT2 GS 201.6 #3 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT GIT2 METEOR 33.1 #3 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT GIT2 ROUGE-L 68.2 #3 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Question Answering (VQA) MSVD-QA GIT Accuracy 0.568 #9 of 36 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.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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