Adjudicated Captioning: Multi-Agent Alignment Scoring and Consensus-Distilled Beam Arbitration for Strict Zero-Shot Image Captioning

arXiv:2607.28986v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-shot image captioning (ZIC) describes images without paired image-caption supervision during captioner training, relying on text-only corpora and frozen pretrained image-text scorers. Existing retrieval-augmented methods score image-text alignment once, at retrieval, then commit the captioner's autoregressive beam under language-model probability alone, leaving the decoder without further visual grounding feedback. Progress has stalled, with n...