# Text-Only Training for Visual Storytelling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08881 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08881/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03023/) (2021)
- [A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01696/) (2016)
- [GeDi: Generative Discriminator Guided Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06367/) (2020)
- [FUDGE: Controlled Text Generation With Future Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05218/) (2021)
- [A Contrastive Framework for Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06417/) (2022)
- [Visual Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03968/) (2016)
- [Learning Visual Features from Large Weakly Supervised Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02251/) (2015)
- [ZeroCap: Zero-Shot Image-to-Text Generation for Visual-Semantic Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14447/) (2021)
- [DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02871/) (2020)
- [Learning Visual N-Grams from Web Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.09161/) (2016)
- [Text-Only Training for Image Captioning using Noise-Injected CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00575/) (2022)
- [Language Models Can See: Plugging Visual Controls in Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02655/) (2022)
- [A Plug-and-Play Method for Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09707/) (2021)
- [Exploring Controllable Text Generation Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01822/) (2020)
- [Structural Adapters in Pretrained Language Models for AMR-to-text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09120/) (2021)
- [CoCon: A Self-Supervised Approach for Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03535/) (2020)
- [No Metrics Are Perfect: Adversarial Reward Learning for Visual Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09160/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Semantic Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12867/) (2024)
- [Context-aware Visual Storytelling with Visual Prefix Tuning and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06259/) (2024)
- [From Image Captioning to Visual Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14045/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual storytelling aims to generate a narrative based on a sequence of images, necessitating both vision-language alignment and coherent story generation. Most existing solutions predominantly depend on paired image-text training data, which can be costly to collect and challenging to scale. To address this, we formulate visual storytelling as a visual-conditioned story generation problem and propose a text-only training method that separates the learning of cross-modality alignment and story generation. Our approach specifically leverages the cross-modality pre-trained CLIP model to integrate visual control into a story generator, trained exclusively on text data. Moreover, we devise a training-free visual condition planner that accounts for the temporal structure of the input image sequence while balancing global and local visual content. The distinctive advantage of requiring only text data for training enables our method to learn from external text story data, enhancing the generalization capability of visual storytelling. We conduct extensive experiments on the VIST benchmark, showcasing the effectiveness of our approach in both in-domain and cross-domain settings. Further evaluations on expression diversity and human assessment underscore the superiority of our method in terms of informativeness and robustness.