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FlexCap: Describe Anything in Images in Controllable Detail
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We introduce FlexCap, a vision-language model that generates region-specific descriptions of varying lengths. FlexCap is trained to produce length-conditioned captions for input boxes, enabling control over information density, with descriptions ranging from concise object labels to detailed captions. To achieve this, we create large-scale training datasets of image region descriptions with varying lengths from captioned web images. We demonstrate FlexCap's effectiveness in several applications: first, it achieves strong performance in dense captioning tasks on the Visual Genome dataset. Second, we show how FlexCap's localized descriptions can serve as input to a large language model to create a visual question answering (VQA) system, achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on multiple VQA benchmarks. Our experiments illustrate FlexCap's utility for tasks including image labeling, object attribute recognition, and visual dialog. Project webpage: https://flex-cap.github.io .
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Synthetic captions were generated using Gemini and FlexCap models.
“Synthetic captions were generated using Gemini and FlexCap (Dwibedi et al., 2024) models and allow the model to learn details about the image.”
From Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World (2025) · cites this paper as Dwibedi et al., 2024
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Metadata
- Authors
- Dwibedi, D., Jain, V., Tompson, J., Zisserman, A., & Aytar, Y.
- Venue
- Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37
- Published
- 2024
- Pages
- 111172-111198
- ISSN
- 1049-5258 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4415795643
- Cited by
- 1
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1
- FWCI
- 0.21
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- arxiv.org
- Locations
- neural information processing systems (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Image Retrieval and Classification Techniques
- Keywords
- image captioning, image description generation
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