A Matched-Budget Audit Framework for Recaptioned Image-Text Supervision Distributions

Recaptioned image-text corpora are now standard for text-to-image (T2I) training, with vision--language model (VLM) captioners replacing sparse alt-text by dense descriptions. A recaptioned corpus is a supervision distribution induced by a documented captioning policy (π), captioner (Vc), and source corpus (C). Length-correlated proxies miss caption-register artifacts and downstream T2I benchmarks entangle the corpus with training choices, so this distribution is hard to audit at corpus scale. We introduce a reusable matched-budget audit framework for recaptioned supervision distributions Dπ,Vc,C: at a fixed text budget of B = 64 it reports a five-axis profile spanning prompt-side coverage, image-conditioned faithfulness, and caption-surface health, with claimed controllable basic units (CBU) as the common claim unit. We instantiate the framework on seven paired comparisons over five public source corpora. Across the four cross-corpus pairs, the released surface raises supported CBU per caption by +3.39 to +6.36 under both Qwen and Gemma Judges, and on CC12M the same framework exposes a long-vs-dense frontier that is consistent across both judges and four budgets. We release the audited multi-source recap corpus (≈ 490M) together with the audit-artifact bundle.