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CLAIR: Evaluating Image Captions with Large Language Models

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arxiv 2310.12971 v1 pith:4C7DN2AQ submitted 2023-10-19 cs.CV cs.AIcs.CL

CLAIR: Evaluating Image Captions with Large Language Models

classification cs.CV cs.AIcs.CL
keywords clairlanguagecaptionsmeasurescaptioncorrelationevaluationexisting
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The evaluation of machine-generated image captions poses an interesting yet persistent challenge. Effective evaluation measures must consider numerous dimensions of similarity, including semantic relevance, visual structure, object interactions, caption diversity, and specificity. Existing highly-engineered measures attempt to capture specific aspects, but fall short in providing a holistic score that aligns closely with human judgments. Here, we propose CLAIR, a novel method that leverages the zero-shot language modeling capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate candidate captions. In our evaluations, CLAIR demonstrates a stronger correlation with human judgments of caption quality compared to existing measures. Notably, on Flickr8K-Expert, CLAIR achieves relative correlation improvements over SPICE of 39.6% and over image-augmented methods such as RefCLIP-S of 18.3%. Moreover, CLAIR provides noisily interpretable results by allowing the language model to identify the underlying reasoning behind its assigned score. Code is available at https://davidmchan.github.io/clair/

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

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  2. ClaimDiff-RL: Fine-Grained Caption Reinforcement Learning through Visual Claim Comparison

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    ClaimDiff-RL replaces holistic scalar rewards with reference-conditioned atomic claim differences verified by a multimodal judge to improve the hallucination-missing-fact tradeoff in long-form image captioning.

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  4. VC-Inspector: Advancing Reference-free Evaluation of Video Captions with Factual Analysis

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  5. SPECS: Specificity-Enhanced CLIP-Score for Long Image Caption Evaluation

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    A new reference-free metric, SPECS, fine-tunes LongCLIP with a specificity objective and reaches LLM-level human correlation on long captions at a fraction of the computational cost.