A Picture is Worth More Than 77 Text Tokens: Evaluating CLIP-Style Models on Dense Captions

Jack Urbanek, Florian Bordes, Pietro Astolfi, Mary Williamson, Vasu Sharma, Adriana Romero-Soriano; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 26700-26709

Curation methods for massive vision-language datasets trade off between dataset size and quality. However even the highest quality of available curated captions are far too short to capture the rich visual detail in an image. To show the value of dense and highly-aligned image-text pairs we collect the Densely Captioned Images (DCI) dataset containing 8012 natural images human-annotated with mask-aligned descriptions averaging above 1000 words each. With precise and reliable captions associated with specific parts of an image we can evaluate vision-language models' (VLMs) understanding of image content with a novel task that matches each caption with its corresponding subcrop. As current models are often limited to 77 text tokens we also introduce a summarized version (sDCI) in which each caption length is limited. We show that modern techniques that make progress on standard benchmarks do not correspond with significant improvement on our sDCI based benchmark. Lastly we finetune CLIP using sDCI and show significant improvements over the baseline despite a small training set. By releasing the first human annotated dense image captioning dataset we hope to enable the development of new benchmarks or fine-tuning recipes for the next generation of VLMs to come.