# From Image Captioning to Visual Storytelling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14045 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14045/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (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)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Self-critical Sequence Training for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00563/) (2016)
- [Attention on Attention for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06954/) (2019)
- [Auto-Encoding Scene Graphs for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02378/) (2018)
- [Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05701/) (2018)
- [Knowing When to Look: Adaptive Attention via A Visual Sentinel for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01887/) (2016)
- [A Contrastive Framework for Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06417/) (2022)
- [Exploring Visual Relationship for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07041/) (2018)
- [Visual Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03968/) (2016)
- [Image Captioning: Transforming Objects into Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05963/) (2019)
- [A Knowledge-Enhanced Pretraining Model for Commonsense Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05139/) (2020)
- [TouchStone: Evaluating Vision-Language Models by Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16890/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual Storytelling is a challenging multimodal task between Vision & Language, where the purpose is to generate a story for a stream of images. Its difficulty lies on the fact that the story should be both grounded to the image sequence but also narrative and coherent. The aim of this work is to balance between these aspects, by treating Visual Storytelling as a superset of Image Captioning, an approach quite different compared to most of prior relevant studies. This means that we firstly employ a vision-to-language model for obtaining captions of the input images, and then, these captions are transformed into coherent narratives using language-to-language methods. Our multifarious evaluation shows that integrating captioning and storytelling under a unified framework, has a positive impact on the quality of the produced stories. In addition, compared to numerous previous studies, this approach accelerates training time and makes our framework readily reusable and reproducible by anyone interested. Lastly, we propose a new metric/tool, named ideality, that can be used to simulate how far some results are from an oracle model, and we apply it to emulate human-likeness in visual storytelling.