MeaCap: Memory-Augmented Zero-shot Image Captioning

Abstract

Zero-shot image captioning (IC) without well-paired image-text data can be divided into two categories, training-free and text-only-training. Generally, these two types of methods realize zero-shot IC by integrating pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP for image-text similarity evaluation and a pre-trained language model (LM) for caption generation. The main difference be-tween them is whether using a textual corpus to train the LM. Though achieving attractive performance w.r.t. some metrics, existing methods often exhibit some com-mon drawbacks. Training-free methods tend to produce hallucinations, while text-only-training often lose gener-alization capability. To move forward, in this paper, we propose a novel Memory-Augmented zero-shot image Captioning framework (MeaCap). Specifically, equipped with a textual memory, we introduce a retrieve-then-filter module to get key concepts that are highly related to the image. By deploying our proposed memory-augmented visual-related fusion score in a keywords-to-sentence LM, MeaCap can generate concept-centered captions that keep high consistency with the image with fewer hallucinations and more world-knowledge. The framework of Mea-Cap achieves the state-of-the-art performance on a se-ries of zero-shot IC settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/joeyzOz/MeaCap.