# ImageInWords: Unlocking Hyper-Detailed Image Descriptions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02793 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02793/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [Object Hallucination in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02156/) (2018)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [Winoground: Probing Vision and Language Models for Visio-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03162/) (2022)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [TextCaps: a Dataset for Image Captioning with Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12462/) (2020)
- [Pix2seq: A Language Modeling Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10852/) (2021)
- [SugarCrepe: Fixing Hackable Benchmarks for Vision-Language Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14610/) (2023)
- [Connecting Vision and Language with Localized Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03098/) (2019)
- [Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08960/) (2019)
- [CREPE: Can Vision-Language Foundation Models Reason Compositionally?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07796/) (2022)
- [RedCaps: web-curated image-text data created by the people, for the people](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11431/) (2021)
- [DOCCI: Descriptions of Connected and Contrasting Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19753/) (2024)
- [PaLI-3 Vision Language Models: Smaller, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09199/) (2023)
- [Captioning Images Taken by People Who Are Blind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08565/) (2020)
- [Probing Image-Language Transformers for Verb Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09141/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Building and better understanding vision-language models: insights and future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12637/) (2024)
- [AuroraCap: Efficient, Performant Video Detailed Captioning and a New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03051/) (2024)
- [From Pixels to Prose: A Large Dataset of Dense Image Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10328/) (2024)
- [FLAIR: VLM with Fine-grained Language-informed Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03561/) (2024)
- [Baichuan-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08565/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models via Directed Scene Graph for Comprehensive Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08614/) (2024)
- [Omni-Captioner: Data Pipeline, Models, and Benchmark for Omni Detailed Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12720/) (2025)
- [LoTLIP: Improving Language-Image Pre-training for Long Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05249/) (2024)
- [Painting with Words: Elevating Detailed Image Captioning with Benchmark and Alignment Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07906/) (2025)
- [FineLIP: Extending CLIP's Reach via Fine-Grained Alignment with Longer Text Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01916/) (2025)
- [CineTechBench: A Benchmark for Cinematographic Technique Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15145/) (2025)
- [Visual Attention Never Fades: Selective Progressive Attention ReCalibration for Detailed Image Captioning in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01419/) (2025)
- [Cycle Consistency as Reward: Learning Image-Text Alignment without Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02095/) (2025)
- [Toward Robust Hyper-Detailed Image Captioning: A Multiagent Approach and Dual Evaluation Metrics for Factuality and Coverage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15484/) (2024)
- [Preserving Multi-Modal Capabilities of Pre-trained VLMs for Improving Vision-Linguistic Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05210/) (2024)
- [Altogether: Image Captioning via Re-aligning Alt-text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17251/) (2024)
- [DenseWorld-1M: Towards Detailed Dense Grounded Caption in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24102/) (2025)
- [Multi-Crit: Benchmarking Multimodal Judges on Pluralistic Criteria-Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21662/) (2025)
- [COCONut-PanCap: Joint Panoptic Segmentation and Grounded Captions for Fine-Grained Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02589/) (2025)
- [Graph-Based Captioning: Enhancing Visual Descriptions by Interconnecting Region Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06723/) (2024)
- [FIX-CLIP: Dual-Branch Hierarchical Contrastive Learning via Synthetic Captions for Better Understanding of Long Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10095/) (2025)
- [Direct Visual Grounding by Directing Attention of Visual Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12738/) (2025)
- [Panoptic Captioning: An Equivalence Bridge for Image and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16334/) (2025)
- [Trust but Verify: Programmatic VLM Evaluation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13121/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Visual Gap: Fine-Tuning Multimodal Models with Knowledge-Adapted Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09018/) (2024)
- [Harnessing Caption Detailness for Data-Efficient Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15172/) (2025)
- [Detailed Object Description with Controllable Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19106/) (2024)
- [BACON: Improving Clarity of Image Captions via Bag-of-Concept Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03314/) (2024)
- [GeoBiked: A Dataset with Geometric Features and Automated Labeling Techniques to Enable Deep Generative Models in Engineering Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17045/) (2024)
- [Unblocking Fine-Grained Evaluation of Detailed Captions: An Explaining AutoRater and Critic-and-Revise Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07631/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the longstanding adage "an image is worth a thousand words," generating accurate hyper-detailed image descriptions remains unsolved. Trained on short web-scraped image text, vision-language models often generate incomplete descriptions with visual inconsistencies. We address this via a novel data-centric approach with ImageInWords (IIW), a carefully designed human-in-the-loop framework for curating hyper-detailed image descriptions. Human evaluations on IIW data show major gains compared to recent datasets (+66%) and GPT4V (+48%) across comprehensiveness, specificity, hallucinations, and more. We also show that fine-tuning with IIW data improves these metrics by +31% against models trained with prior work, even with only 9k samples. Lastly, we evaluate IIW models with text-to-image generation and vision-language reasoning tasks. Our generated descriptions result in the highest fidelity images, and boost compositional reasoning by up to 6% on ARO, SVO-Probes, and Winoground datasets. We release the IIW Eval benchmark with human judgement labels, object and image-level annotations from our framework, and existing image caption datasets enriched via IIW-model.