# DIR: Retrieval-Augmented Image Captioning with Comprehensive Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.01115 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01115/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 34 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Multimodal RAG](https://mlsanity.com/rag/multimodal-rag/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [ClipCap: CLIP Prefix for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09734/) (2021)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Hyperfeatures: Searching Through Time and Space for Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14334/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12561/) (2022)
- [Language Models with Image Descriptors are Strong Few-Shot Video-Language Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10747/) (2022)
- [SmallCap: Lightweight Image Captioning Prompted with Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15323/) (2022)
- [Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04858/) (2023)
- [Semantic-Conditional Diffusion Networks for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03099/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Feedback Helps CLIP See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20171/) (2024)
- [Do You Remember? Dense Video Captioning with Cross-Modal Memory Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07610/) (2024)
- [MeaCap: Memory-Augmented Zero-shot Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03715/) (2024)
- [Transferable Decoding with Visual Entities for Zero-Shot Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16525/) (2023)
- [EVCap: Retrieval-Augmented Image Captioning with External Visual-Name Memory for Open-World Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15879/) (2023)

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

- [QualiRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Visual Quality Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18195/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image captioning models often suffer from performance degradation when applied to novel datasets, as they are typically trained on domain-specific data. To enhance generalization in out-of-domain scenarios, retrieval-augmented approaches have garnered increasing attention. However, current methods face two key challenges: (1) image features used for retrieval are often optimized based on ground-truth (GT) captions, which represent the image from a specific perspective and are influenced by annotator biases, and (2) they underutilize the full potential of retrieved text, typically relying on raw captions or parsed objects, which fail to capture the full semantic richness of the data. In this paper, we propose Dive Into Retrieval (DIR), a method designed to enhance both the image-to-text retrieval process and the utilization of retrieved text to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the visual content. Our approach introduces two key innovations: (1) diffusion-guided retrieval enhancement, where a pretrained diffusion model guides image feature learning by reconstructing noisy images, allowing the model to capture more comprehensive and fine-grained visual information beyond standard annotated captions; and (2) a high-quality retrieval database, which provides comprehensive semantic information to enhance caption generation, especially in out-of-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIR not only maintains competitive in-domain performance but also significantly improves out-of-domain generalization, all without increasing inference costs.