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Figuring out Figures: Using Textual References to Caption Scientific Figures

2024/06/25 by Stanley Cao, Cao, Stanley, Liu, Kevin
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Subtitles and Audiovisual Media #Video Analysis and Summarization

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.11008

openalex publication_date 2024/06/25 · openalex created_date 2024/10/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Figures are essential channels for densely communicating complex ideas in scientific papers. Previous work in automatically generating figure captions has been largely unsuccessful and has defaulted to using single-layer LSTMs, which no longer achieve state-of-the-art performance. In our work, we use the SciCap datasets curated by Hsu et al. and use a variant of a CLIP+GPT-2 encoder-decoder model with cross-attention to generate captions conditioned on the image. Furthermore, we augment our training pipeline by creating a new dataset MetaSciCap that incorporates textual metadata from the original paper relevant to the figure, such as the title, abstract, and in-text references. We use SciBERT to encode the textual metadata and use this encoding alongside the figure embedding. In our experimentation with different models, we found that the CLIP+GPT-2 model performs better when it receives all textual metadata from the SciBERT encoder in addition to the figure, but employing a SciBERT+GPT2 model that uses only the textual metadata achieved optimal performance.

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