Papers › ZeroCap: Zero-Shot Image-to-Text Generation for Visual-Semantic Arithmetic

ZeroCap: Zero-Shot Image-to-Text Generation for Visual-Semantic Arithmetic

29 Nov 2021CVPR 2022 1arXiv:2111.14447archive 2025-07-28

Yoad Tewel, Yoav Shalev, Idan Schwartz, Lior Wolf

Recent text-to-image matching models apply contrastive learning to large corpora of uncurated pairs of images and sentences. While such models can provide a powerful score for matching and subsequent zero-shot tasks, they are not capable of generating caption given an image. In this work, we repurpose such models to generate a descriptive text given an image at inference time, without any further training or tuning steps. This is done by combining the visual-semantic model with a large language model, benefiting from the knowledge in both web-scale models. The resulting captions are much less restrictive than those obtained by supervised captioning methods. Moreover, as a zero-shot learning method, it is extremely flexible and we demonstrate its ability to perform image arithmetic in which the inputs can be either images or text, and the output is a sentence. This enables novel high-level vision capabilities such as comparing two images or solving visual analogy tests. Our code is available at: https://github.com/YoadTew/zero-shot-image-to-text.

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Tasks

Contrastive LearningDescriptiveImage CaptioningImage to textLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelSentenceText GenerationZero-Shot Learning

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