Adjudicated Captioning: Multi-Agent Alignment Scoring and Consensus-Distilled Beam Arbitration for Strict Zero-Shot Image Captioning
Zero-shot image captioning (ZIC) describes images without paired image-caption supervision during captioner training, relying on text-only corpora and frozen pretrained image-text scorers. Existing retrieval-augmented methods score image-text alignment once, at retrieval, then commit the captioner's autoregressive beam under language-model probability alone, leaving the decoder without further visual grounding feedback. Progress has stalled, with no method improving on the strict-regime best since 2024. We propose Adjudicated Captioning, an inference-time multi-agent framework that restores grounding feedback at multiple checkpoints over an unchanged IFCap captioner. First, we install a s...
| Authors | Duy Tran Thanh, Thien-Phuc Doan, Long Nguyen-Vu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 31 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 July 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.