Papers › ViPCap: Retrieval Text-Based Visual Prompts for Lightweight Image Captioning
ViPCap: Retrieval Text-Based Visual Prompts for Lightweight Image Captioning
Taewhan Kim, Soeun Lee, Si-Woo Kim, Dong-Jin Kim
Recent lightweight image captioning models using retrieved data mainly focus on text prompts. However, previous works only utilize the retrieved text as text prompts, and the visual information relies only on the CLIP visual embedding. Because of this issue, there is a limitation that the image descriptions inherent in the prompt are not sufficiently reflected in the visual embedding space. To tackle this issue, we propose ViPCap, a novel retrieval text-based visual prompt for lightweight image captioning. ViPCap leverages the retrieved text with image information as visual prompts to enhance the ability of the model to capture relevant visual information. By mapping text prompts into the CLIP space and generating multiple randomized Gaussian distributions, our method leverages sampling to explore randomly augmented distributions and effectively retrieves the semantic features that contain image information. These retrieved features are integrated into the image and designated as the visual prompt, leading to performance improvements on the datasets such as COCO, Flickr30k, and NoCaps. Experimental results demonstrate that ViPCap significantly outperforms prior lightweight captioning models in efficiency and effectiveness, demonstrating the potential for a plug-and-play solution. The source code is available at https://github.com/taewhankim/VIPCAP.
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.
Methods
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