SynC: Synthetic Image Caption Dataset Refinement with One-to-many Mapping for Zero-shot Image Captioning

ACM MM 2025 Si-Woo Kim, MinJu Jeon, Ye-Chan Kim, Soeun Lee, Taewhan Kim, Dong-Jin Kim

Abstract

SynC refines noisy synthetic image-caption datasets through a one-to-many mapping that re-aligns each image with its best-matching captions from the generated pool. This data-centric refinement boosts zero-shot image captioning performance without any additional human annotation.