InfoMetIC: An Informative Metric for Reference-free Image Caption Evaluation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing image captioning metrics provide a single score to measure caption qualities, which are less explainable and informative. |
| Approach: | They propose an Informative Metric for Reference-free Image Caption evaluation to support this feedback . they propose to provide a text precision score, a vision recall score and an overall quality score . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing metrics on multiple benchmarks and compares coarse-grained scores with human judgements. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have proposed reference-free evaluations of image captions . however, these approaches are restrictive and favor captions with similar vocabulary but different meanings. |
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CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Image captioning relies on reference-based automatic evaluations, but references are expensive to collect and comparing against multiple human-authored captions is insufficient. |
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Transparent Human Evaluation for Image Captioning (2022.naacl-main)
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Jungo Kasai, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Lavinia Dunagan, Jacob Morrison, Ronan Le Bras, Yejin Choi, Noah A. Smith
| Challenge: | Recent work has demonstrated that image captioning is a complex task that requires a large amount of human input. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on explainable evaluation metrics generate explanations without standardized criteria and the overall quality of the generated explanations remains unverified. |
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| Challenge: | Existing image captioning metrics focus on linguistic aspects and do not match human judgements at sentence-level. |
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| Challenge: | Existing image captioning evaluation metrics do not provide an explanation for the assigned numerical score. |
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TIGEr: Text-to-Image Grounding for Image Caption Evaluation (D19-1)
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Ming Jiang, Qiuyuan Huang, Lei Zhang, Xin Wang, Pengchuan Zhang, Zhe Gan, Jana Diesner, Jianfeng Gao
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics for image captioning evaluation provide an overall quality score, which is difficult to infer specific description errors. |
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What Makes for Good Image Captions? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a formal information-theoretic framework is developed for image captioning . the pyramid of captions is a method that generates enriched captions by integrating local and global visual information. |
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SPECS: Specificity-Enhanced CLIP-Score for Long Image Caption Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | N-gram-based evaluation metrics are unreliable due to low correlation to human judgments. |
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