arXiv subjects

Kazuki Matsuda

Publications and source records attributed to Kazuki Matsuda.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Rigel: Self-Distilled Score Adaptation for Image and Video Captioning Evaluation

Automatic evaluation of image and video captioning is essential for benchmarking multimodal systems, although standard evaluation metrics show limited alignment with human judgments. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs), commonly referred to as LLM-as-a-Judge, have improved alignment with human judgments but still suffer from a mismatch between large-vocabulary language modeling and evaluation over a small label set. To address this, we propose Rigel, an automatic evaluation metric for image and video captioning, based on self-distilled score adaptation. The metric employs an evaluation-specific scoring head distilled from a frozen LLM, which captures judgment signals in a task-aligned space without relying on large-vocabulary token sets. We then refine the LLM backbone with human judgment data. To train Rigel, we constructed the Vid-Lepus dataset, which contains 3,338 video clips, 33,380 reference captions, and 5,637 candidate captions. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that Rigel outperforms state-of-the-art metrics, achieving over 10-point improvements on ActivityNet-Fact in the reference-free setting.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

LLM-Free Image Captioning Evaluation in Reference-Flexible Settings

We focus on the automatic evaluation of image captions in both reference-based and reference-free settings. Existing metrics based on large language models (LLMs) favor their own generations; therefore, the neutrality is in question. Most LLM-free metrics do not suffer from such an issue, whereas they do not always demonstrate high performance. To address these issues, we propose Pearl, an LLM-free supervised metric for image captioning, which is applicable to both reference-based and reference-free settings. We introduce a novel mechanism that learns the representations of image--caption and caption--caption similarities. Furthermore, we construct a human-annotated dataset for image captioning metrics, that comprises approximately 333k human judgments collected from 2,360 annotators across over 75k images. Pearl outperformed other existing LLM-free metrics on the Composite, Flickr8K-Expert, Flickr8K-CF, Nebula, and FOIL datasets in both reference-based and reference-free settings. Our project page is available at https://pearl.kinsta.page/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

VELA: An LLM-Hybrid-as-a-Judge Approach for Evaluating Long Image Captions

In this study, we focus on the automatic evaluation of long and detailed image captions generated by multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Most existing automatic evaluation metrics for image captioning are primarily designed for short captions and are not suitable for evaluating long captions. Moreover, recent LLM-as-a-Judge approaches suffer from slow inference due to their reliance on autoregressive inference and early fusion of visual information. To address these limitations, we propose VELA, an automatic evaluation metric for long captions developed within a novel LLM-Hybrid-as-a-Judge framework. Furthermore, we propose LongCap-Arena, a benchmark specifically designed for evaluating metrics for long captions. This benchmark comprises 7,805 images, the corresponding human-provided long reference captions and long candidate captions, and 32,246 human judgments from three distinct perspectives: Descriptiveness, Relevance, and Fluency. We demonstrated that VELA outperformed existing metrics and achieved superhuman performance on LongCap-Arena.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

ZINA: Multimodal Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Editing

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often generate hallucinations, where the output deviates from the visual content. Given that these hallucinations can take diverse forms, detecting hallucinations at a fine-grained level is essential for comprehensive evaluation and analysis. To this end, we propose a novel task of multimodal fine-grained hallucination detection and editing for MLLMs. Moreover, we propose ZINA, a novel method that identifies hallucinated spans at a fine-grained level, classifies their error types into six categories, and suggests appropriate refinements. To train and evaluate models for this task, we construct VisionHall, a dataset comprising 6.9k outputs from twelve MLLMs manually annotated by 211 annotators, and 20k synthetic samples generated using a graph-based method that captures dependencies among error types. We demonstrated that ZINA outperformed existing methods, including GPT-4o and Llama-3.2, in both detection and editing tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

DENEB: A Hallucination-Robust Automatic Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning

In this work, we address the challenge of developing automatic evaluation metrics for image captioning, with a particular focus on robustness against hallucinations. Existing metrics are often inadequate for handling hallucinations, primarily due to their limited ability to compare candidate captions with multifaceted reference captions. To address this shortcoming, we propose DENEB, a novel supervised automatic evaluation metric specifically robust against hallucinations. DENEB incorporates the Sim-Vec Transformer, a mechanism that processes multiple references simultaneously, thereby efficiently capturing the similarity between an image, a candidate caption, and reference captions. To train DENEB, we construct the diverse and balanced Nebula dataset comprising 32,978 images, paired with human judgments provided by 805 annotators. We demonstrated that DENEB achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing LLM-free metrics on the FOIL, Composite, Flickr8K-Expert, Flickr8K-CF, Nebula, and PASCAL-50S datasets, validating its effectiveness and robustness against hallucinations.

cs.CV↗