Papers › KALE: An Artwork Image Captioning System Augmented with Heterogeneous Graph
KALE: An Artwork Image Captioning System Augmented with Heterogeneous Graph
Yanbei Jiang, Krista A. Ehinger, Jey Han Lau
Exploring the narratives conveyed by fine-art paintings is a challenge in image captioning, where the goal is to generate descriptions that not only precisely represent the visual content but also offer a in-depth interpretation of the artwork's meaning. The task is particularly complex for artwork images due to their diverse interpretations and varied aesthetic principles across different artistic schools and styles. In response to this, we present KALE Knowledge-Augmented vision-Language model for artwork Elaborations), a novel approach that enhances existing vision-language models by integrating artwork metadata as additional knowledge. KALE incorporates the metadata in two ways: firstly as direct textual input, and secondly through a multimodal heterogeneous knowledge graph. To optimize the learning of graph representations, we introduce a new cross-modal alignment loss that maximizes the similarity between the image and its corresponding metadata. Experimental results demonstrate that KALE achieves strong performance (when evaluated with CIDEr, in particular) over existing state-of-the-art work across several artwork datasets. Source code of the project is available at https://github.com/Yanbei-Jiang/Artwork-Interpretation.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections