Challenge: Existing metrics for image captioning evaluation provide an overall quality score, which is difficult to infer specific description errors.
Approach: They propose a fine-grained evaluation method REO for automatically measuring the performance of image captioning systems.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves higher consistency with human judgments and provides more intuitive evaluation results than other metrics.

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TIGEr: Text-to-Image Grounding for Image Caption Evaluation (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing metrics based on text-level comparisons fail to assess the quality of captions produced by machines.
Approach: They propose to use a machine-learned text-image grounding model to measure the accuracy of machine-generated captions and their correlation with human judgments.
Outcome: The proposed metric has higher consistency with human judgments and is more accurate than existing metrics.
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.
An Examination of the Robustness of Reference-Free Image Captioning Evaluation Metrics (2024.findings-eacl)

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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.
Approach: They propose to use reference-free metrics to evaluate image captions . they propose to combine lexical overlap and semantics to identify fine-grained errors .
Outcome: The proposed metrics struggle to identify fine-grained errors, the authors show . CLIPScore, UMIC, and PAC-S are sensitive to variations in image-relevant objects mentioned in the caption .
Tangled up in BLEU: Reevaluating the Evaluation of Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for judging metrics are sensitive to the translations used for evaluation, leading to falsely confident conclusions about a metric’s efficacy.
Approach: They propose a method for thresholding performance improvement under an automatic metric against human judgements by using a pairwise system ranking method.
Outcome: The proposed method allows quantification of type I versus type II errors incurred, i.e., insignificant human differences in system quality that are accepted, and significant human differences that are rejected.
CLAIR: Evaluating Image Captions with Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing measures for image caption evaluation fail to capture dimensions of similarity . a novel method that leverages the zero-shot language modeling capabilities of large language models (LLMs) demonstrates a stronger correlation with human judgments of caption quality compared to existing measures.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages the zero-shot language modeling capabilities of large language models to evaluate captions.
Outcome: The proposed method shows a stronger correlation with human judgments of caption quality compared to other measures.
Learning-based Composite Metrics for Improved Caption Evaluation (P18-3)

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Challenge: Existing image captioning metrics focus on linguistic aspects and do not match human judgements at sentence-level.
Approach: They propose to incorporate lexical and semantic metrics as features to capture adequacy and fluency of captions at different linguistic levels.
Outcome: The proposed framework captures adequacy and fluency of captions at different linguistic levels.
Quality Estimation for Image Captions Based on Large-scale Human Evaluations (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: a problem with automatic image captioning is that it produces low quality captions when used in the wild.
Approach: They propose to model caption quality from a human perspective and *without* access to ground-truth references.
Outcome: The proposed model can detect and filter out low-quality captions on previously unseen images.
Transparent Human Evaluation for Image Captioning (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent work has demonstrated that image captioning is a complex task that requires a large amount of human input.
Approach: They develop a human evaluation protocol for image captioning models based on machine- and human-generated captions on the MSCOCO dataset.
Outcome: The proposed model improves CLIPScore, a recent metric that uses image features, and improves human judgments because it is more sensitive to recall.
Evaluation of Multilingual Image Captioning: How far can we get with CLIP models? (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to evaluate image captions are English-centric, despite improvements in the CLIPScore metric . however, there are no available benchmarks for multilingual captioning evaluation .
Approach: They propose to use machine-translated and machine-repurposed datasets to evaluate CLIPScore variants in multilingual settings.
Outcome: The proposed evaluation strategies are based on machine-translated and human judgements.
FLEUR: An Explainable Reference-Free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning Using a Large Multimodal Model (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing image captioning evaluation metrics do not provide an explanation for the assigned numerical score.
Approach: They propose an explainable reference-free metric to provide an explanation for captions . they introduce score smoothing to align as closely as possible with human judgment .
Outcome: The proposed metric achieves high correlations with human judgment across image captioning evaluation benchmarks and is publicly available at https://github.com/Yebin46/FLEUR.

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