LMCAP: Few-shot Multilingual Image Captioning by Retrieval Augmented Language Model Prompting

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Multilingual image captioning has recently been tackled by training with large-scale machine translated data, which is an expensive, noisy, and time-consuming process. Without requiring any multilingual caption data, we propose LMCAP, an image-blind few-shot multilingual captioning model that works by prompting a language model with retrieved captions. Specifically, instead of following the standard encoder-decoder paradigm, given an image, LMCAP first retrieves the captions of similar images using a multilingual CLIP encoder. These captions are then combined into a prompt for an XGLM decoder, in order to generate captions in the desired language. In other words, the generation model does not directly process the image, instead processing retrieved captions. Experiments on the XM3600 dataset of geographically diverse images show that our model is competitive with fully-supervised multilingual captioning models, without requiring any supervised training on any captioning data.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFindings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publication date2023
Pages1635-1651
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429623
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2023 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: 9 Jul 202314 Jul 2023

Conference

Conference61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2023
LandCanada
ByToronto
Periode09/07/202314/07/2023
SponsorBloomberg Engineering, et al., Google Research, Liveperson, Meta, Microsoft

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Association for Computational Linguistics.

ID: 373548359