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Visual Attention Never Fades: Selective Progressive Attention ReCalibration for Detailed Image Captioning in Multimodal Large Language Models

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arxiv 2502.01419 v2 pith:WN4NYAUM submitted 2025-02-03 cs.CV cs.AI

Visual Attention Never Fades: Selective Progressive Attention ReCalibration for Detailed Image Captioning in Multimodal Large Language Models

classification cs.CV cs.AI
keywords visualattentionsparcrecalltokensprecisioncaptioningcaptions
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Detailed image captioning is essential for tasks like data generation and aiding visually impaired individuals. High-quality captions require a balance between precision and recall, which remains challenging for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In this work, we hypothesize that this limitation stems from weakening and increasingly noisy visual attention as responses lengthen. To address this issue, we propose SPARC (Selective Progressive Attention ReCalibration), a training-free method that enhances the contribution of visual tokens during decoding. SPARC is founded on three key observations: (1) increasing the influence of all visual tokens reduces recall; thus, SPARC selectively amplifies visual tokens; (2) as captions lengthen, visual attention becomes noisier, so SPARC identifies critical visual tokens by leveraging attention differences across time steps; (3) as visual attention gradually weakens, SPARC reinforces it to preserve its influence. Our experiments, incorporating both automated and human evaluations, demonstrate that existing methods improve the precision of MLLMs at the cost of recall. In contrast, our proposed method enhances both precision and recall with minimal computational overhead.

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Forward citations

Cited by 10 Pith papers

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