Captioning Daily Activity Images in Early Childhood Education: Benchmark and Algorithm

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Sixing, Gu, Zhibin, Zhang, Ziqi, Pan, Weiguo, Li, Bing, Wang, Ying, Liu, Hongzhe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Sixing
Gu, Zhibin
Zhang, Ziqi
Pan, Weiguo
Li, Bing
Wang, Ying
Liu, Hongzhe
author_facet Li, Sixing
Gu, Zhibin
Zhang, Ziqi
Pan, Weiguo
Li, Bing
Wang, Ying
Liu, Hongzhe
contents Image captioning for Early Childhood Education (ECE) is essential for automated activity understanding and educational assessment. However, existing methods face two key challenges. First, the lack of large-scale, domain-specific datasets limits the model's ability to capture fine-grained semantic concepts unique to ECE scenarios, resulting in generic and imprecise descriptions. Second, conventional training paradigms exhibit limitations in enhancing professional object description capability, as supervised learning tends to favor high-frequency expressions, while reinforcement learning may suffer from unstable optimization on difficult samples. To address these limitations, we introduce ECAC, a large-scale benchmark for ECE daily activity image captioning, comprising 256,121 real-world images annotated with expert-level captions and fine-grained labels. ECAC is further equipped with a domain-oriented evaluation protocol, the Teaching Toy Recognition Score (TTS), to explicitly measure professional object naming accuracy. Furthermore, we propose RSRS (Reward-Conditional Switch of Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning), a hybrid training framework that dynamically alternates between RL and supervised optimization. By rerouting hard samples with zero rewards to supervised fine-tuning, RSRS effectively mitigates advantage collapse and enables stable optimization for fine-grained recognition. Leveraging ECAC and RSRS, we develop KinderMM-Cap-3B, a domain-adapted multimodal large language model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves a TTS of 51.06, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining superior caption quality, highlighting its potential for specialized educational applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01941
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Captioning Daily Activity Images in Early Childhood Education: Benchmark and Algorithm
Li, Sixing
Gu, Zhibin
Zhang, Ziqi
Pan, Weiguo
Li, Bing
Wang, Ying
Liu, Hongzhe
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Image captioning for Early Childhood Education (ECE) is essential for automated activity understanding and educational assessment. However, existing methods face two key challenges. First, the lack of large-scale, domain-specific datasets limits the model's ability to capture fine-grained semantic concepts unique to ECE scenarios, resulting in generic and imprecise descriptions. Second, conventional training paradigms exhibit limitations in enhancing professional object description capability, as supervised learning tends to favor high-frequency expressions, while reinforcement learning may suffer from unstable optimization on difficult samples. To address these limitations, we introduce ECAC, a large-scale benchmark for ECE daily activity image captioning, comprising 256,121 real-world images annotated with expert-level captions and fine-grained labels. ECAC is further equipped with a domain-oriented evaluation protocol, the Teaching Toy Recognition Score (TTS), to explicitly measure professional object naming accuracy. Furthermore, we propose RSRS (Reward-Conditional Switch of Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning), a hybrid training framework that dynamically alternates between RL and supervised optimization. By rerouting hard samples with zero rewards to supervised fine-tuning, RSRS effectively mitigates advantage collapse and enables stable optimization for fine-grained recognition. Leveraging ECAC and RSRS, we develop KinderMM-Cap-3B, a domain-adapted multimodal large language model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves a TTS of 51.06, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining superior caption quality, highlighting its potential for specialized educational applications.
title Captioning Daily Activity Images in Early Childhood Education: Benchmark and Algorithm
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01941