Do Image-Text Metrics Respect Semantic Invariances?
Reference-free image-to-text evaluators are now standard for scoring image-caption alignment, yet it is unclear whether they respect semantic invariances. We present an invariance probe on five popular evaluators (CLIPScore, PAC-S, UMIC, FLEUR, and a deterministic LLM judge) under semantics-preserving perturbations along three axes -- spatial (flips, context-preserving repositioning, light rotations), object (scale, category), and socio-linguistic framing (cultural/economic adjectives with neutral and length-matched controls). Across curated slices of three detection datasets and three caption evaluation suites, we find consistent non-semantic sensitivities, where benign spatial edits and...
| Authors | Amit Agarwal, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Meizhu Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 23 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 May 2026 |
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