Aadarsh Anantha Ramakrishnan
2025
RONA: Pragmatically Diverse Image Captioning with Coherence Relations
Aashish Anantha Ramakrishnan
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Aadarsh Anantha Ramakrishnan
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Dongwon Lee
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing 2025)
Writing Assistants (e.g., Grammarly, Microsoft Copilot) traditionally generate diverse image captions by employing syntactic and semantic variations to describe image components. However, human-written captions prioritize conveying a central message alongside visual descriptions using pragmatic cues. To enhance caption diversity, it is essential to explore alternative ways of communicating these messages in conjunction with visual content. We propose RONA, a novel prompting strategy for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLM) that leverages Coherence Relations as a controllable axis for pragmatic variations. We demonstrate that RONA generates captions with better overall diversity and ground-truth alignment, compared to MLLM baselines across multiple domains. Our code is available at: https://github.com/aashish2000/RONA