Controllable Contextualized Image Captioning: Directing the Visual Narrative through User-Defined Highlights
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Abstract (arXiv)
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 is available at https://github.com/ShunqiM/Ctrl-CIC .
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 52 of its 69 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2024.
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52 of 69 references.
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38 more
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
3 papers.
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- 2025Unveiling Effective In-Context Configurations for Image Captioning: An External & Internal Analysis
- 2025RONA: Pragmatically Diverse Image Captioning with Coherence Relations
- 2024No Detail Left Behind: Revisiting Self-Retrieval for Fine-Grained Image Captioning
- 2025Visual Attention Never Fades: Selective Progressive Attention ReCalibration for Detailed Image Captioning in Multimodal Large Language Models
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