# Pixels to Prose: Understanding the art of Image Captioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15714 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15714/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 84 of its 135 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [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)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [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)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13884/) (2021)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [ClipCap: CLIP Prefix for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09734/) (2021)
- [Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4389/) (2014)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Plug-and-Adapt: Multimodal Coreference Resolution at First Sight with a Pretrained Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17950/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the era of evolving artificial intelligence, machines are increasingly emulating human-like capabilities, including visual perception and linguistic expression. Image captioning stands at the intersection of these domains, enabling machines to interpret visual content and generate descriptive text. This paper provides a thorough review of image captioning techniques, catering to individuals entering the field of machine learning who seek a comprehensive understanding of available options, from foundational methods to state-of-the-art approaches. Beginning with an exploration of primitive architectures, the review traces the evolution of image captioning models to the latest cutting-edge solutions. By dissecting the components of these architectures, readers gain insights into the underlying mechanisms and can select suitable approaches tailored to specific problem requirements without duplicating efforts. The paper also delves into the application of image captioning in the medical domain, illuminating its significance in various real-world scenarios. Furthermore, the review offers guidance on evaluating the performance of image captioning systems, highlighting key metrics for assessment. By synthesizing theoretical concepts with practical application, this paper equips readers with the knowledge needed to navigate the complex landscape of image captioning and harness its potential for diverse applications in machine learning and beyond.