Papers › nocaps: novel object captioning at scale

nocaps: novel object captioning at scale

20 Dec 2018ICCV 2019 10arXiv:1812.08658archive 2025-07-28

Harsh Agrawal, Karan Desai, YuFei Wang, Xinlei Chen, Rishabh Jain, Mark Johnson, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh, Stefan Lee, Peter Anderson

Image captioning models have achieved impressive results on datasets containing limited visual concepts and large amounts of paired image-caption training data. However, if these models are to ever function in the wild, a much larger variety of visual concepts must be learned, ideally from less supervision. To encourage the development of image captioning models that can learn visual concepts from alternative data sources, such as object detection datasets, we present the first large-scale benchmark for this task. Dubbed 'nocaps', for novel object captioning at scale, our benchmark consists of 166,100 human-generated captions describing 15,100 images from the OpenImages validation and test sets. The associated training data consists of COCO image-caption pairs, plus OpenImages image-level labels and object bounding boxes. Since OpenImages contains many more classes than COCO, nearly 400 object classes seen in test images have no or very few associated training captions (hence, nocaps). We extend existing novel object captioning models to establish strong baselines for this benchmark and provide analysis to guide future work on this task.

PaperPDFConference PDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="1812.08658")

Code

Syntology Ran 0 of 2 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 2 have no recorded run.

By repository: official repository: 2 samples from 1 repository, 0 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

nocaps-org/updown-baseline officialpytorchMIT report

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

2 samples harvested; 0 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 2 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

2unverified

Licence: 0 of the 2 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from nocaps-org/updown-baseline. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

select_best_beam nocaps-org/updown-baseline/updown/utils/decoding.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · f6d8d3b14e31142a · report
select_best_beam_with_constraints nocaps-org/updown-baseline/updown/utils/decoding.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 35d87aa8053e1da3 · report

Tasks

Image CaptioningObjectObject Detectionobject-detection

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

NoCaps

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