Evcap: Retrieval-Augmented Image Captioning with External Visual-Name Memory for Open-World Comprehension

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs)-based image captioning has the capability of describing objects not explicitly observed in training data; yet novel objects occur frequently, necessitating the requirement of sustaining up-to-date object knowledge for open-world comprehension. Instead of relying on large amounts of data and/or scaling up network parameters, we introduce a highly effective retrieval-augmented image captioning method that prompts LLMs with object names retrieved from External Visual-name memory (EVCAP). We build ever-changing object knowledge memory using objects' visuals and names, enabling us to (i) update the memory at a minimal cost and (ii) effort-lessly augment LLMs with retrieved object names by uti-lizing a lightweight and fast-to-train model. Our model, which was trained only on the COCO dataset, can adapt to out-of-domain without requiring additional fine-tuning or retraining. Our experiments conducted on benchmarks and synthetic commonsense-violating data show that EV-CAP, with only 3.97M trainable parameters, exhibits superior performance compared to other methods based on frozen pretrained LLMs. Its performance is also competitive to specialist SOTAs that require extensive training.