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Poster

Controllable Contextualized Image Captioning: Directing the Visual Narrative through User-Defined Highlights

Shunqi Mao · Chaoyi Zhang · Hang Su · Hwanjun Song · Igor Shalyminov · Weidong Cai

Strong blind review: This paper was not made available on public preprint services during the review process Strong Double Blind
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Tue 1 Oct 1:30 a.m. PDT — 3:30 a.m. PDT

Abstract:

Contextualized Image Captioning (CIC) evolves traditional image captioning into a more complex domain, necessitating the ability for multimodal reasoning. It aims to generate image captions given specific contextual information. This paper further introduces a novel domain of Controllable Contextualized Image Captioning (Ctrl-CIC). Unlike CIC, which solely relies on broad context, Ctrl-CIC accentuates a user-defined highlight, compelling the model to tailor captions that resonate with the highlighted aspects of the context. We present two approaches, Prompting-based Controller (P-Ctrl) and Recalibration-based Controller (R-Ctrl), to generate focused captions. P-Ctrl conditions the model generation on highlight by prepending captions with highlight-driven prefixes, whereas R-Ctrl tunes the model to selectively recalibrate the encoder embeddings for highlighted tokens. Additionally, we design a GPT-4V empowered evaluator to assess the quality of the controlled captions alongside standard assessment methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficient and effective controllability of our method, charting a new direction in achieving user-adaptive image captioning. Code will be released upon acceptance.

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