Top-Down Semantic Refinement for Image Captioning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhang, Jusheng, Cai, Kaitong, Yang, Jing, Wang, Jian, Tang, Chengpei, Wang, Keze
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhang, Jusheng
Cai, Kaitong
Yang, Jing
Wang, Jian
Tang, Chengpei
Wang, Keze
author_facet Zhang, Jusheng
Cai, Kaitong
Yang, Jing
Wang, Jian
Tang, Chengpei
Wang, Keze
contents Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face an inherent contradiction in image captioning: their powerful single-step generation capabilities often lead to a myopic decision-making process. This makes it difficult to maintain global narrative coherence while capturing rich details, a limitation that is particularly pronounced in tasks that require multi-step and complex scene description. To overcome this fundamental challenge, we redefine image captioning as a goal-oriented hierarchical refinement planning problem, and further propose a novel framework, named Top-Down Semantic Refinement (TDSR), which models the generation process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, planning within the vast state space of a VLM presents a significant computational hurdle. Our core contribution, therefore, is the design of a highly efficient Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm tailored for VLMs. By incorporating a visual-guided parallel expansion and a lightweight value network, our TDSR reduces the call frequency to the expensive VLM by an order of magnitude without sacrificing planning quality. Furthermore, an adaptive early stopping mechanism dynamically matches computational overhead to the image's complexity. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, including DetailCaps, COMPOSITIONCAP, and POPE, demonstrate that our TDSR, as a plug-and-play module, can significantly enhance the performance of existing VLMs (e.g., LLaVA-1.5, Qwen2.5-VL) by achieving state-of-the-art or highly competitive results in fine-grained description, compositional generalization, and hallucination suppression.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22391
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Top-Down Semantic Refinement for Image Captioning
Zhang, Jusheng
Cai, Kaitong
Yang, Jing
Wang, Jian
Tang, Chengpei
Wang, Keze
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face an inherent contradiction in image captioning: their powerful single-step generation capabilities often lead to a myopic decision-making process. This makes it difficult to maintain global narrative coherence while capturing rich details, a limitation that is particularly pronounced in tasks that require multi-step and complex scene description. To overcome this fundamental challenge, we redefine image captioning as a goal-oriented hierarchical refinement planning problem, and further propose a novel framework, named Top-Down Semantic Refinement (TDSR), which models the generation process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, planning within the vast state space of a VLM presents a significant computational hurdle. Our core contribution, therefore, is the design of a highly efficient Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm tailored for VLMs. By incorporating a visual-guided parallel expansion and a lightweight value network, our TDSR reduces the call frequency to the expensive VLM by an order of magnitude without sacrificing planning quality. Furthermore, an adaptive early stopping mechanism dynamically matches computational overhead to the image's complexity. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, including DetailCaps, COMPOSITIONCAP, and POPE, demonstrate that our TDSR, as a plug-and-play module, can significantly enhance the performance of existing VLMs (e.g., LLaVA-1.5, Qwen2.5-VL) by achieving state-of-the-art or highly competitive results in fine-grained description, compositional generalization, and hallucination suppression.
title Top-Down Semantic Refinement for Image Captioning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22391