CAPability: A Comprehensive Visual Caption Benchmark for Evaluating Both Correctness and Thoroughness

Visual captioning benchmarks have become outdated with the emergence of modern multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as the brief ground-truth sentences and traditional metrics fail to assess detailed captions effectively. While recent benchmarks attempt to address this by focusing on keyword extraction or object-centric evaluation, they remain limited to vague-view or object-view analyses and incomplete visual element coverage. In this paper, we introduce CAPability, a comprehensive multi-view benchmark for evaluating visual captioning across 12 dimensions spanning six critical views. We curate nearly 11K human-annotated images and videos with visual element annotations to evaluate the generated captions. CAPability stably assesses both the correctness and thoroughness of captions with \textit{precision} and \textit{hit} metrics. By converting annotations to QA pairs, we further introduce a heuristic metric, \textit{know but cannot tell} ($K\bar{T}$), indicating a significant performance gap between QA and caption capabilities. Our work provides a holistic analysis of MLLMs' captioning abilities, as we identify their strengths and weaknesses across various dimensions, guiding future research to enhance specific aspects of their capabilities.

Authors

• Zhihang Liu University of Science and Technology of China
• Chen-Wei Xie
• Bin Wen
• Feiwu Yu
• Pandeng Li University of Science and Technology of China
• Boqiang Zhang
• Nianzu Yang
• Zuan Gao
• Yun Zheng Alibaba Group
• Hongtao Xie University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

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