Efficient Image Captioning for Edge Devices: Limitations and Future Work

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2 Related Work

3 Methodology and 3.1 Model Architecture

3.2 Model Training

3.3 Knowledge Distillation

4 Experiments

4.1 Datasets and Metrics and 4.2 Implementation Details

4.3 Ablation Study

4.4 Inference on the Mobile Device and 4.5 State-of-the-art Comparison

5 Conclusion and References

A Implementation Details

B Visualization Results

C Results on Nocaps

D Limitations and Future Work

D Limitations and Future Work

Despite the super-balanced performance and efficiency, the proposed framework still has some limitations:

(1) Training a More Efficient CLIP. The main computational cost of our work lies in the visual backbone (i.e., ResNet-50). In the future, we plan to train an EfficientNet-based CLIP model to further reduce the feature extraction latency of the visual encoder.

(2) End-to-end Training. Currently, we freeze the model parameters of the CLIP ResNet-50 backbone. We observe that end-to-end training of the visual backbone will degrade the performance, potentially due to the limited training data in the image captioning domain. In the future, we intend to include more data to facilitate the joint training of the visual backbone and fusion model.

(3) Adding More Pre-training Data. Although our approach adopts the cross-modal pre-training, as shown in Table 9, our pre-training data is much less than the recent LEMON (Hu et al. 2021a), BLIP (Li et al. 2022), and SimVLM (Wang et al. 2021). In the future, we plan to involve more pre-training data to boost the captioning quality.