Publications

Perturbation Robust Metric for Multi-Lingual Image Captioning

EMNLP 2023 Findings

Publication date: December 10, 2023

Yongil Kim, Yerin Hwang, Hyeongu Yun, David Seunghyun Yoon, Trung Bui, Kyomin Jung

Vulnerability to lexical perturbation is a critical weakness of automatic evaluation metrics for image captioning. This paper proposes Perturbation Robust Multi-Lingual CLIPScore(PR-MCS), which exhibits robustness to such perturbations, as a novel reference-free image captioning metric applicable to multiple languages. To achieve perturbation robustness, we fine-tune the text encoder of CLIP with our language-agnostic method to distinguish the perturbed text from the original text. To verify the robustness of PR-MCS, we introduce a new fine-grained evaluation dataset consisting of detailed captions, critical objects, and the relationships between the objects for 3, 000 images in five languages. In our experiments, PR-MCS significantly outperforms baseline metrics in capturing lexical noise of all various perturbation types in all five languages, proving that PR-MCS is highly robust to lexical perturbations.

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