RACap: Relation-Aware Prompting for Lightweight Retrieval-Augmented Image Captioning

Xiaosheng Long, Hanyu Wang, Zhentao Song, Kun Luo, Hongde Liu
9/19/2025
cs.CVcs.AI

No confident code implementation found for this paper. 4 possible matches can be shown below.

Abstract

Recent retrieval-augmented image captioning methods incorporate external knowledge to compensate for the limitations in comprehending complex scenes. However, current approaches face challenges in relation modeling: (1) the representation of semantic prompts is too coarse-grained to capture fine-grained relationships; (2) these methods lack explicit modeling of image objects and their semantic relationships. To address these limitations, we propose RACap, a relation-aware retrieval-augmented model for image captioning, which not only mines structured relation semantics from retrieval captions, but also identifies heterogeneous objects from the image. RACap effectively retrieves structured relation features that contain heterogeneous visual information to enhance the semantic consistency and relational expressiveness. Experimental results show that RACap, with only 10.8M trainable parameters, achieves superior performance compared to previous lightweight captioning models.

View on arXivView PDF

Code Implementations

No confident code match yet

We couldn't find an author-owned or strongly-evidenced community implementation for this paper. 4 weaker matches are hidden by default — verify before relying on them.

No code implementations found yet.

Know of an implementation? Let us know in the comments below!

Similar Papers

Cite this paper

@article{long2025racap,
  title  = {RACap: Relation-Aware Prompting for Lightweight Retrieval-Augmented Image Captioning},
  author = {Xiaosheng Long and Hanyu Wang and Zhentao Song and Kun Luo and Hongde Liu},
  year   = {2025},
  eprint = {2509.15883},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15883v1}
}

Add a badge to your README

Shows whether official code is linked for this paper.

Code of Paper badge
[![Code of Paper](https://codeofpaper.com/badge/2509.15883.svg)](https://codeofpaper.com/paper/2509.15883)

Discussion