Multimodal video captioning condenses dense footage into a structured format of keyframes and natural language. By creating a cohesive multimodal summary, this approach anchors generative AI in rich semantic evidence and serves as a lightweight proxy for high-efficiency retrieval. However, traditional metrics like BLEU or ROUGE fail to quantify information coverage across disparate modalities, such as comparing a paragraph of text to a sequence of keyframes. To address this, we propose the Video Summary Information Loss (ViSIL) score, an information-theoretic framework that quantifies the video information not captured by a summary via vision-language model (VLM) inference. By measuring the information loss, ViSIL is a unified metric that enables direct comparison across multimodal summary formats despite their structural discrepancies. Our results demonstrate that ViSIL scores show a statistically significant correlation with both human and VLM performance on Video Question Answering (VQA) tasks. ViSIL also enables summary selection to optimize the trade-off between information loss and processing speed, establishing a Pareto-optimal frontier that outperforms text summaries by $7\%$ in VQA accuracy without increasing processing load.
Recent video and language pretraining frameworks lack the ability to generate sentences. We present Multimodal Video Generative Pretraining (MV-GPT), a new pretraining framework for learning from unlabelled videos which can be effectively used for generative tasks such as multimodal video captioning. Unlike recent video-language pretraining frameworks, our framework trains both a multimodal video encoder and a sentence decoder jointly. To overcome the lack of captions in unlabelled videos, we leverage the future utterance as an additional text source and propose a bidirectional generation obje…
A large number of annotated video-caption pairs are required for training video captioning models, resulting in high annotation costs. Active learning can be instrumental in reducing these annotation requirements. However, active learning for video captioning is challenging because multiple semantically similar captions are valid for a video, resulting in high entropy outputs even for less-informative samples. Moreover, video captioning algorithms are multimodal in nature with a visual encoder and language decoder. Further, the sequential and combinatorial nature of the output makes the proble…
We hypothesize that end-to-end neural image captioning systems work seemingly well because they exploit and learn `distributional similarity' in a multimodal feature space by mapping a test image to similar training images in this space and generating a caption from the same space. To validate our hypothesis, we focus on the `image' side of image captioning, and vary the input image representation but keep the RNN text generation component of a CNN-RNN model constant. Our analysis indicates that image captioning models (i) are capable of separating structure from noisy input representations; (…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Inspired by the fact that different modalities in videos carry complementary information, we propose a Multimodal Semantic Attention Network(MSAN), which is a new encoder-decoder framework incorporating multimodal semantic attributes for video captioning. In the encoding phase, we detect and generate multimodal semantic attributes by formulating it as a multi-label classification problem. Moreover, we add auxiliary classification loss to our model that can obtain more effective visual features and high-level multimodal semantic attribute distributions for sufficient video encoding. In the deco…
EAMA : Entity-Aware Multimodal Alignment Based Approach for News Image Captioning
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学电子工程与计算机科学学院）
FLEUR: An Explainable Reference-Free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning Using a Large Multimodal Model
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（首尔大学人工智能跨学科项目）；Department of Mathematical Sciences, Seoul National University（首尔大学数学科学系）
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Image captioning aims to automatically generate a natural language description of a given image, and most state-of-the-art models have adopted an encoder-decoder framework. The framework consists of a convolution neural network (CNN)-based image encoder that extracts region-based visual features from the input image, and an recurrent neural network (RNN)-based caption decoder that generates the output caption words based on the visual features with the attention mechanism. Despite the success of existing studies, current methods only model the co-attention that characterizes the inter-modal in…
Mila；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Learning specific hands-on skills such as cooking, car maintenance, and home repairs increasingly happens via instructional videos. The user experience with such videos is known to be improved by meta-information such as time-stamped annotations for the main steps involved. Generating such annotations automatically is challenging, and we describe here two relevant contributions. First, we construct and release a new dense video captioning dataset, Video Timeline Tags (ViTT), featuring a variety of instructional videos together with time-stamped annotations. Second, we explore several multimoda…
ABMAMBA: Multimodal Large Language Model with Aligned Hierarchical Bidirectional Scan for Efficient Video Captioning
Keio University（庆应义塾大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；National Institute of Informatics Research and Development Center for Large Language Models（国立信息学研究所大型语言模型研发中心）
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Understanding images without explicit supervision has become an important problem in computer vision. In this paper, we address image captioning by generating language descriptions of scenes without learning from annotated pairs of images and their captions. The core component of our approach is a shared latent space that is structured by visual concepts. In this space, the two modalities should be indistinguishable. A language model is first trained to encode sentences into semantically structured embeddings. Image features that are translated into this embedding space can be decoded into des…
CCRC: A Change-Aware Captioning and Reasoning Chain for Image Change Captioning and Segmentation
College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, China（湖南大学计算机科学与电子工程学院，中国）；Guangxi Minzu University, China（广西民族大学，中国）；National University of Defense Technology, China（国防科学技术大学，中国）
The Graduate Center, The City University of New York（纽约市立大学研究生中心）；The City College, The City University of New York（纽约市立大学城市学院）
In this paper, a self-guiding multimodal LSTM (sg-LSTM) image captioning model is proposed to handle uncontrolled imbalanced real-world image-sentence dataset. We collect FlickrNYC dataset from Flickr as our testbed with 306,165 images and the original text descriptions uploaded by the users are utilized as the ground truth for training. Descriptions in FlickrNYC dataset vary dramatically ranging from short term-descriptions to long paragraph-descriptions and can describe any visual aspects, or even refer to objects that are not depicted. To deal with the imbalanced and noisy situation and to …
Player-Centric Multimodal Prompt Generation for Large Language Model Based Identity-Aware Basketball Video Captioning
Beijing University of Technology（北京理工大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Detecting and Understanding Hateful Contents in Memes Through Captioning and Visual Question-Answering
The University of Sydney, School of Computer Science（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；University of Technology Sydney, School of Computer Science（新南威尔士大学技术学院）；University of Technology Sydney, TD School（新南威尔士大学TD学院）；Australian Catholic University, Peter Faber Business School（澳大利亚天主教大学彼得·法伯商学院）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Toutiao AI Lab（今日头条人工智能实验室）；UESTC（电子科技大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
In this work we formulate the problem of image captioning as a multimodal translation task. Analogous to machine translation, we present a sequence-to-sequence recurrent neural networks (RNN) model for image caption generation. Different from most existing work where the whole image is represented by convolutional neural network (CNN) feature, we propose to represent the input image as a sequence of detected objects which feeds as the source sequence of the RNN model. In this way, the sequential representation of an image can be naturally translated to a sequence of words, as the target sequen…
BTCChat: Advancing Remote Sensing Bi-temporal Change Captioning with Multimodal Large Language Model
State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology（网络与交换技术国家重点实验室）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Aerospace Information Research Institute（航天信息研究所）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；School of Geographical Sciences（地理科学学院）；Hunan Normal University（湖南师范大学）
Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing（智能感知与计算研究中心）；National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition（模式识别国家重点实验室）；Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Video captioning which automatically translates video clips into natural language sentences is a very important task in computer vision. By virtue of recent deep learning technologies, e.g., convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs), video captioning has made great progress. However, learning an effective mapping from visual sequence space to language space is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a Multimodal Memory Model (M3) to describe videos, which builds a visual and textual shared memory to model the long-term visual-textual dependency an…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
The topic diversity of open-domain videos leads to various vocabularies and linguistic expressions in describing video contents, and therefore, makes the video captioning task even more challenging. In this paper, we propose an unified caption framework, M&M TGM, which mines multimodal topics in unsupervised fashion from data and guides the caption decoder with these topics. Compared to pre-defined topics, the mined multimodal topics are more semantically and visually coherent and can reflect the topic distribution of videos better. We formulate the topic-aware caption generation as a multi-ta…
Automatically captioning images with natural language sentences is an important research topic. State of the art models are able to produce human-like sentences. These models typically describe the depicted scene as a whole and do not target specific objects of interest or emotional relationships between these objects in the image. However, marketing companies require to describe these important attributes of a given scene. In our case, objects of interest are consumer goods, which are usually identifiable by a product logo and are associated with certain brands. From a marketing point of view…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Meta AI；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）
Performing 3D dense captioning and visual grounding requires a common and shared understanding of the underlying multimodal relationships. However, despite some previous attempts on connecting these two related tasks with highly task-specific neural modules, it remains understudied how to explicitly depict their shared nature to learn them simultaneously. In this work, we propose UniT3D, a simple yet effective fully unified transformer-based architecture for jointly solving 3D visual grounding and dense captioning. UniT3D enables learning a strong multimodal representation across the two tasks…
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Mississippi State University（密西西比州立大学）
Automatically generating a natural language sentence to describe the content of an input video is a very challenging problem. It is an essential multimodal task in which auditory and visual contents are equally important. Although audio information has been exploited to improve video captioning in previous works, it is usually regarded as an additional feature fed into a black box fusion machine. How are the words in the generated sentences associated with the auditory and visual modalities? The problem is still not investigated. In this paper, we make the first attempt to design an interpreta…
Modelling Visual Semantics via Image Captioning to extract Enhanced Multi-Level Cross-Modal Semantic Incongruity Representation with Attention for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection
Recently, video captioning has been attracting an increasing amount of interest, due to its potential for improving accessibility and information retrieval. While existing methods rely on different kinds of visual features and model structures, they do not fully exploit relevant semantic information. We present an extensible approach to jointly leverage several sorts of visual features and semantic attributes. Our novel architecture builds on LSTMs for sentence generation, with several attention layers and two multimodal layers. The attention mechanism learns to automatically select the most s…
HiTZ Basque Center for Language Technologies（HiTZ巴斯克语言技术中心）；University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学（UPV/EHU））
Integrating outside knowledge for reasoning in visio-linguistic tasks such as visual question answering (VQA) is an open problem. Given that pretrained language models have been shown to include world knowledge, we propose to use a unimodal (text-only) train and inference procedure based on automatic off-the-shelf captioning of images and pretrained language models. Our results on a visual question answering task which requires external knowledge (OK-VQA) show that our text-only model outperforms pretrained multimodal (image-text) models of comparable number of parameters. In contrast, our mod…
College of Information Science & Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学信息科学与电子工程学院）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Department of Computer Science, Binghamton University（宾汉姆顿大学计算机科学系）
In this paper, we focus on the problem of applying the transformer structure to video captioning effectively. The vanilla transformer is proposed for uni-modal language generation task such as machine translation. However, video captioning is a multimodal learning problem, and the video features have much redundancy between different time steps. Based on these concerns, we propose a novel method called sparse boundary-aware transformer (SBAT) to reduce the redundancy in video representation. SBAT employs boundary-aware pooling operation for scores from multihead attention and selects diverse f…
RSICCLLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning
State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（人工智能安全国家重点实验室，计算技术研究所，中国科学院，北京，中国）；Great Bay University, Dongguan, China（东莞Great Bay大学，中国）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China（哈尔滨工业大学深圳学院，中国）；Dongguan Key Laboratory for Intelligence and Information Technology, Dongguan, China（东莞智能与信息科技重点实验室，中国）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Utah（犹他大学）
Combining the visual modality with pretrained language models has been surprisingly effective for simple descriptive tasks such as image captioning. More general text generation however remains elusive. We take a step back and ask: How do these models work for more complex generative tasks, i.e. conditioning on both text and images? Are multimodal models simply visually adapted language models, or do they combine they reason jointly over modalities? We investigate these questions in the context of self-rationalization (jointly generating task labels/answers and free-text explanations) of three…
Sam-Guided Enhanced Fine-Grained Encoding with Mixed Semantic Learning for Medical Image Captioning
Zhejiang University-University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学-伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校联合学院，浙江大学）；Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院附属邵逸夫医院）
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba AI Labs（阿里巴巴人工智能实验室）
Image captioning is a multimodal task involving computer vision and natural language processing, where the goal is to learn a mapping from the image to its natural language description. In general, the mapping function is learned from a training set of image-caption pairs. However, for some language, large scale image-caption paired corpus might not be available. We present an approach to this unpaired image captioning problem by language pivoting. Our method can effectively capture the characteristics of an image captioner from the pivot language (Chinese) and align it to the target language …
Unveiling Effective In-Context Configurations for Image Captioning: An External & Internal Analysis
School of Computer Science & Engineering, Key Lab of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology & Its Interdisciplinary Applications (Ministry of Education), Southeast University, China（计算机科学与工程学院，新一代人工智能技术及跨学科应用重点实验室，东南大学，中国）；Faculty of IT, Monash University, Australia（信息科技学院，墨尔本大学，澳大利亚）；School of Computer Science & Engineering, Southeast University, China（计算机科学与工程学院，东南大学，中国）
