S.-P. Yeh

Yu-Guan Hsieh, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Shih-Ying Yeh et al. · uw

Humans describe complex scenes with compositionality, using simple text descriptions enriched with links and relationships. While vision-language research has aimed to develop models with compositional understanding capabilities, this is not reflected yet in existing datasets which, for the most part, still use plain text to describe images. In this work, we propose a new annotation strategy, graph-based captioning (GBC) that describes an image using a labeled graph structure, with nodes of various types. The nodes in GBC are created through a two-stage process: first, identifying and describing entity nodes; second, linking these nodes by highlighting \textit{compositions} and \textit{relations} among them. Since \textit{all} GBC nodes hold plain text descriptions, GBC retains the flexibility found in natural language, but can also encode hierarchical information in its edges. We demonstrate that GBC can be produced automatically, using off-the-shelf multimodal LLMs and object detection models, by building a new dataset GBC10M that gathers GBC annotations for about 10M images of the CC12M dataset. Through CLIP training on GBC10M, we show that leveraging GBC nodes' annotations -- particularly those in composition and relation nodes -- significantly boosts the model's performance across various benchmarks compared to when other annotations are used. To further explore the opportunities provided by GBC, we also investigate the use of GBC as middleware for text-to-image generation, and show the extra benefits of incorporating the graph structure in this task. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/apple/ml-gbc and https://huggingface.co/graph-based-captions.

Shih-Ying Yeh, Sang-Hyun Park, Yi Li et al.

TIPO (Text-to-Image Prompt Optimization) introduces an efficient approach for automatic prompt refinement in text-to-image (T2I) generation. Starting from simple user prompts, TIPO leverages a lightweight pre-trained model to expand these prompts into richer, detailed versions. Conceptually, TIPO samples refined prompts from a targeted sub-distribution within the broader semantic space, preserving the original intent while significantly improving visual quality, coherence, and detail. Unlike resource-intensive methods based on large language models (LLMs) or reinforcement learning (RL), TIPO provides computational efficiency and scalability, opening new possibilities for effective, automated prompt engineering in T2I tasks. We provide visual results, human preference report to investigate TIPO's effectiveness. Experimental evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate substantial improvements in aesthetic quality, significant reduction of visual artifacts, and enhanced alignment with target distributions along with significant human preference proficiency. These results highlight the importance of targeted prompt engineering in text-to-image tasks and indicate broader opportunities for automated prompt refinement.