2023/05/04 by Teng Wang, Wang, Teng, Jinrui Zhang +13 · 15 citations
Computer Science · #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.02677
openalex publication_date 2023/05/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Controllable image captioning is an emerging multimodal topic that aims to describe the image with natural language following human purpose, e.g., looking at the specified regions or telling in a particular text style. State-of-the-art methods are trained on annotated pairs of input controls and output captions. However, the scarcity of such well-annotated multimodal data largely limits their usability and scalability for interactive AI systems. Leveraging unimodal instruction-following foundation models is a promising alternative that benefits from broader sources of data. In this paper, we present Caption AnyThing (CAT), a foundation model augmented image captioning framework supporting a wide range of multimodel controls: 1) visual controls, including points, boxes, and trajectories; 2) language controls, such as sentiment, length, language, and factuality. Powered by Segment Anything Model (SAM) and ChatGPT, we unify the visual and language prompts into a modularized framework, enabling the flexible combination between different controls. Extensive case studies demonstrate the user intention alignment capabilities of our framework, shedding light on effective user interaction modeling in vision-language applications. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ttengwang/Caption-Anything.