# Unveiling Effective In-Context Configurations for Image Captioning: An External & Internal Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08021 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08021/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 72 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [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)
- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [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)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [VideoNSA: Native Sparse Attention Scales Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02295/) (2025)
- [Where to Place the Query? Unveiling and Mitigating Positional Bias in In-Context Learning for Diffusion LLMs via Decoding Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19349/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The evolution of large models has witnessed the emergence of In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of ICL. Inspired by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have developed Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with ICL capabilities. However, explorations of demonstration configuration for multimodal ICL remain preliminary. Additionally, the controllability of In-Context Examples (ICEs) provides an efficient and cost-effective means to observe and analyze the inference characteristics of LMMs under varying inputs. This paper conducts a comprehensive external and internal investigation of multimodal in-context learning on the image captioning task. Externally, we explore demonstration configuration strategies through three dimensions: shot number, image retrieval, and caption assignment. We employ multiple metrics to systematically and thoroughly evaluate and summarize key findings. Internally, we analyze typical LMM attention characteristics and develop attention-based metrics to quantify model behaviors. We also conduct auxiliary experiments to explore the feasibility of attention-driven model acceleration and compression. We further compare performance variations between LMMs with identical model design and pretraining strategies and explain the differences from the angles of pre-training data features. Our study reveals both how ICEs configuration strategies impact model performance through external experiments and characteristic typical patterns through internal inspection, providing dual perspectives for understanding multimodal ICL in LMMs. Our method of combining external and internal analysis to investigate large models, along with our newly proposed metrics, can be applied to broader research areas.